Knowledge Management Strategies

by Jerry Honeycutt ISBN: 0735607249

Microsoft Press © 2000 (239 pages)
This book serves as a guide to managing digital information and turning it
into knowledge useful to our organizations.

Table of Contents

Knowledge Management Strategies

Introduction
Part I - Organization
Chapter 1 - Knowledge Sources
Chapter 2 - Organizational Barriers
Part II - Process
Chapter 3 - Product Design
Chapter 4 - Customer Management
Chapter 5 - Employee Management
Chapter 6 - Business Planning
Part III - Technology
Chapter 7 - Digital Dashboard
Chapter 8 - Microsoft Exchange Web Storage System
Chapter 9 - Wireless Solutions
Chapter 10 - Intelligent Interfaces
Part IV - Appendix
Appendix - Technology Roadmap
Glossary
Index
List of Figures
List of Sidebars

Knowledge Management Strategies

By Jerry Honeycutt

Published By
Microsoft Press
A Division of Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, Washington 98052-6399

Copyright © 2000 by Microsoft Corporation

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form
or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Honeycutt, Jerry.
Knowledge Management Strategies / Jerry Honeycutt.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7356-0724-9
1. Knowledge management. I. Title.
HD30.2 .H66 2000
658.4'038--dc21 00-035158

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 WCWC 5 4 3 2 1 0

Distributed in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited.

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Acquisitions Editor: Juliana Aldous
Project Editor: Anne Taussig
For all my friends, old and new
Acknowledgments

This book is unlike any I’ve written in the past. Rather than communicating my ideas and
opinions, I’m communicating Microsoft’s vision for knowledge management. That’s what
you’re really interested in learning, after all. That leaves me with a whole lot of people at
Microsoft to thank, as this book is more or less an executive summary of documents and
information they produced.

Some of the information, particularly case studies that Microsoft made available to me, is
unattributed. Even though the authors are unknown, I’d like to thank them anyway. To
the authors of the following case studies, my sincerest gratitude for producing well-
written study material and allowing me to use it in this book: Foster Parents Plan of
Canada, British Petroleum, California Pizza Kitchen, Connect Austria ONE,
HarperCollins Publishers, JD Edwards, KPMG, Microsoft Developer Network, Microsoft
Direct Access, Microsoft Expense Tracking, Microsoft HeadTrax, Microsoft HR Web,
Microsoft Performance Reviews, Microsoft US Sales, Nabisco, Siemens Business
Services, Snapper Power Equipment, South Australian Government, Snyder Healthcare
Sales, Toys R Us, University of Texas, and World Economic Forum. My gratitude also
extends to the companies that participated in these case studies.
In addition to case studies, I’ve captured the best information from a handful of Microsoft
white papers and presented it here in this book. The authors of those white papers
deserve a special nod as they’re the early innovators, the folks who are guiding
Microsoft’s vision for knowledge management. These include Matthias Leibmann,
program manager with World Wide Technical Services, who authored A Way to KM
Solutions along with Mukesh Agarwal, Howard Crow, Per Vonge Nielsen, and Michael
Ohata. A similar Microsoft white paper, Practicing Knowledge Management, was equally
useful in preparing this book, but this paper is unattributed. Thank you, whoever
produced this thought-out guide to knowledge management. Last, a document called
Digital Dashboard Business Process Assessment Guide, produced for Microsoft by
InfoCal, is the basis for a lot of information in this book. My thanks to the folks at InfoCal
(http://www.infocal.com) for producing this document.
This book’s editors might be last in these acknowledgements, but they’re certainly not
least. Without the editors, this book would never have happened. They prodded me to
finish. They ensured that the text made sense and that the thoughts were complete.
They kept track of tiny little details that boggle the mind. In particular, I’d like to thank
Anne Taussig, the book’s project editor and one of the sharper individuals I’ve met, as
well as the copy editor, Anne Owen, and the technical editor, Allen Wyatt. Also, Juliana
Aldous, acquisitions editor, and Tracy Thomsic, content manager, were there from the
very start, showed great patience, and were in the largest part responsible for this book
existing in the first place. Thanks to both of you for everything.
Jerry Honeycutt
Jerry Honeycutt empowers people to work and play better by helping them use popular
technologies such as the Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office product families. In the
last several years, he has written 25 books, most available internationally. His most
recent book from Microsoft Press is Introducing Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional.
Jerry is also a frequent speaker at public events and is presenting a Microsoft-sponsored
seminar called Best Practices for Large Scale Distribution of Office 2000 and Windows
2000. Prior to his career as a writer and speaker, Jerry helped companies such as
Southland Corporation, IRM, Nielsen North America, and IBM to build and use
technology. Jerry graduated from University of Texas at Dallas in 1992 with a BS degree
in Computer Science. Prior to attending UTD, he spent three years at Texas Tech
University in Lubbock, Texas. In his spare time, Jerry plays golf, dabbles with
photography, and travels.

Introduction
Snapper Power Equipment Company is a leading producer of yard-care equipment. For
half a century, the Georgia-based company produced lawnmowers, tillers, garden
tractors, and snow blowers. Snapper products are known for quality, and, for many
decades, Snapper was the category leader. The company has been around long enough
to witness a simple industry become crowded and utterly ruthless under the pressures of
mass-market competition. It's in that environment that Snapper decided to overhaul its
sales force. Instead of selling its products to 30 distributors, Snapper reorganized to sell
to thousands of dealers directly.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, the lawnmower market changed. The
average American lawn was shrinking. Homeowners were spending less time
maintaining their lawns. Moreover, Snapper's competitors were flooding the market with
lower-quality, lower-priced lawnmowers, reducing the company's profitability as it tried to
remain competitive. By the middle of 1997, Snapper had expanded its sales force from
10 to 65 people, who were servicing accounts from local hardware stores to megastores
such as The Home Depot.

The results were disappointing. Snapper's paper-based ordering system, which worked
fine with 10 salespeople and 30 distributors, collapsed under the weight of the larger
organization. It couldn't keep up with 65 salespeople and thousands of dealers.
Salespeople lugged around huge catalogs and price books containing information on
more than 2,000 products. After taking orders, they hastened to the office to type and
submit them. Errors were common, particularly in McDonough, where separate computer
systems maintained the company's ordering, manufacturing, and processing data.
Employees shared data by passing around disks or retyping information as required.
Quality and customer service were suffering. According to Howard Jones, Snapper's MIS
director, We were struggling to react quickly to the marketplace, and we were losing
money. We were not getting orders into the factory or product out of the factory in time;
we were getting the wrong orders; we were dropping orders. Dealers didn't have what
they needed from us, so they were selling something else. Lawnmowers are all about
floor space. If it's not there on the floor, you can't sell it.

Snapper recognized the problem and, to remedy it, developed a sales-force automation
system that leverages existing investments in technology and combines them with new
technologies. Their new information network links the sales force, plant managers,
marketing directors, and financial planners together, creating a single, continuous loop of
real-time information that helps the company turn on a dime. From a single, familiar user
interface, salespeople walk customers through an online ordering process, enter account
information, file expense reports, and collaborate with customers and associates.
The transformation is remarkable, almost inspirational. Demand now drives the
production processes. Manufacturing adjusts production on a daily basis to reflect the
marketplace's changing demands, which the marketing department better understands
because of real-time access to important data. Jones explains, Without this technology
giving information access to rank-and-file workers, decisions have to flow through a very
hierarchical chain of command. The further away you get from customers, the fuzzier
those decisions get. This solution lets us keep decisions close to the employees who are
touching customers [in] the real world. We make decisions where the data is freshest,
and the rest of the company can stay in step.
Snapper has unwittingly built the beginning of a knowledge-management system, a new
approach to managing information that allows organizations to develop exciting tools that
supplement the tried-and-true. The result is an integrated system that allows
organizations to manage, optimize, and take advantage of the information coursing
through it. This introduction describes knowledge management to you. I urge you to take
action because, as Bill Gates explains in his book, Business @ the Speed of Thought,
"In a Darwinian business world, the quality of an organization's [knowledge-
management] system helps determine its ability to sense change and quickly respond,
thus determining whether it dies, survives, or thrives." Will your company thrive in this
environment?

Knowledge Management
Knowledge-management systems get the right information to the right people at the right
time, provide them with the tools for analyzing that information, and give them the power
to respond to the insight they glean from that information all at lightning speed. As shown
by Snapper, knowledge-management systems enable manufacturing to adjust
production to meet demand, based on real-time information from the sales force. It
enables just-in-time delivery of supplies and products, as retailers query the company's
inventory and the company queries suppliers' inventories of raw materials. It also
eliminates the countless hierarchies of red tape that impede day-to-day business. I'm
speaking of paper-based systems that slow business processes; centralized decision-
making that wastes the knowledge and experience of the workers who are closest to
products and customers; and poorly connected computer systems that prohibit
departments from sharing information.
Knowledge management is a discipline that treats intellectual capital as a managed
asset. Knowledge management isn't a centralized database that contains all the
information known by an organization's workers. It's the idea of gaining business insight
from varieties of sources including databases, Web sites, employees, and business
partners and cultivating that information wherever it resides. Business insight comes
from capturing information and giving it greater meaning via its relationship to other
information in the company. And to allay fears, knowledge management is not about
making plug-and-play workers, dispensable because all they know is recorded for the
next person who fills their shoes; it's about delivering information to knowledge workers,
partnering culture, business processes, and technology to make businesses and people
successful. Many factors contribute to the recent interest in knowledge management:
ƒ Companies' valuations depend less on their fixed assets than on their
management skills and how quickly they adapt to changing business climates.
More than at any other time in history, investors value companies based on what
they know.
ƒ Trends toward leaner, meaner organizations result in employees who take
what they know with them when they leave the company. Thomas H. Davenport
and Laurence Prusak call this phenomenon corporate amnesia in their book,
Working Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 1998).
ƒ A global economy in which information travels at lightning-fast speeds is an
important factor. In the last 50 years, economies have changed from labor-
oriented, production-valued systems to intellectual and skill-valued systems. In
Intellectual Capital (Doubleday, 1997), Thomas A. Stewart notes that in the
United States, production workers accounted for only 34 percent of the
workforce in 1980, as opposed to 57 percent in 1940 and 76 percent in 1900.
 ƒ Technology itself makes a strong contribution. The ability for technology to
capture data, information, and knowledge has far outpaced knowledge workers'
ability to absorb and analyze it. But it has also evolved to a point that allows
companies to achieve Microsoft's vision of knowledge workers without limits. In
this vision, Microsoft's approach is to focus technology on the source of
companies' knowledge: knowledge workers.
ƒ The existing ways of doing business are constantly under attack, more so now
due to rapid changes in economies. Businesses must respond more quickly.
The old ways of doing business and the old tools such as TQM, Reengineering,
and Activity Based Costing don't cut it any more. Companies now understand
that managing knowledge as well as the innovative processes is the way to
remain competitive in a ruthless, fast-paced business climate.
Every company implements knowledge management differently. Each has unique
knowledge assets and unique challenges within their organizations. Each has different
processes and measures success in different ways. Therefore, knowledge-management
solutions are unique to the companies that implement them. (Answers don't come in a
box.) The following figure illustrates the key issues that companies deal with when they
implement a knowledge-management solution. Not only must companies identify their
knowledge assets, they must identify and overcome cultural barriers to knowledge
management. They must align their knowledge-management solution with their business
processes. Last, by applying the technology to the right problems, they enable
knowledge workers. Each part of this book, "Organization", "Process", and "Technology",
addresses these issues.

Figure a: Knowledge management

Organization
Chapter 1, Knowledge Sources, helps you accomplish one of the most difficult aspects of
implementing knowledge management: identifying the company's knowledge assets. As
you'll learn, there are three key places to look for knowledge. First, business data is hard
facts: databases. At the next level is information, the result of analyzing and interpreting
business data. It's the value that people add to data when they add their own
experiences and ideas to it. Information is explicit. Examples of business information
include e-mail, voice mail, and presentations. As you'll learn, at their own peril, many
businesses rely solely on business data and information to make decisions rather than
relying on knowledge, which comprises implicit experiences, ideas, insights, values, and
judgments. Knowledge is dynamic and hides in places like business processes. The only
way to harness knowledge is through collaboration, which is why Microsoft's knowledge-
management initiatives focus on collaboration.
Identifying knowledge assets is only half the battle, however. With few exceptions, most
companies indicate that cultural issues are their greatest barriers to implementing a
knowledge-management solution. Employees tend to spend a lot of energy cultivating
their knowledge to distinguish themselves in the organization. Of course, you've heard
the phrase knowledge is power, and, in an organization that fosters this kind of spirit,
companies encourage people to hoard what they know. In addition to people who hoard
knowledge, another group of people is afraid of innovation and considers adopting
technology a bit risky. Chapter 2, Organizational Barriers, describes how to overcome
these barriers through old-fashioned leadership and evangelism.

Process

Any knowledge-management solution must align with a business' processes. Thus, the
effort begins by examining the company's processes for strengths and weaknesses,
looking for ideas about where knowledge management will have its greatest impact the
biggest bang for the buck. Places to look include the four key business processes for
which knowledge management has real, practical benefits:
ƒ Product/service design and development. (See Chapter 3, Product Design.)
ƒ Customer and issue management (See Chapter 4, Customer Management.)
ƒ Employee management/development. (See Chapter 5, Employee
Management.)
ƒ Business analysis and planning. (See Chapter 6, Business Planning.)

Technology
At Microsoft TechEd 99, Bob Muglia announced that Microsoft was pursuing its vision of
knowledge workers without limits with four key initiatives: digital dashboards, Microsoft
Exchange Web Storage System, wireless connectivity, and intelligent interfaces. The last
part of this book, Technology, describes each of these initiatives:
ƒ Digital dashboards give users one familiar place to go in which they can share
knowledge and gain insight from important business information. Digital
dashboards are built with Microsoft Office 2000 using open standards such as
HTML and XML. They provide a rich environment for displaying and organizing
information with which knowledge workers are already familiar.
ƒ Exchange Web Storage System seamlessly integrates information from
varieties of sources and allows knowledge workers to access that information
from already familiar user interfaces. It combines the functionality of the file
system, the Web, and a collaboration server, providing a single location for
storing and managing information. Information in the Web Storage System is
accessible via products you already use today, Microsoft Office 2000 and Web
browsers, as well as from within your digital dashboard.
ƒ Wireless solutions allow knowledge workers to access information anytime
from anywhere. New types of mobile devices such as phones, pagers, tablet
PCs, and handheld computers ensure that they can access the information they
need when and where they need it.
ƒ Intelligent interfaces enable knowledge workers to interact with computers in
more natural ways. Types of intelligent interfaces include natural language
processing, handwriting recognition, and speech recognition. Microsoft
continues to make significant research investments in each of these innovations.
Also, Microsoft recently announced ClearType, which is a display technology
that brings the quality of LCD text up to par with printed text. ClearType
promises to make technologies such as electronic books a reality.

The goal of these four initiatives is to pour a firm foundation for building knowledge-
management solutions. The success of knowledge management depends on users'
interaction with the company's information, so the initiatives enable them to use tools
with which they are already familiar without requiring them to learn new ways of working.
These initiatives also allow businesses to leverage existing investments in technology as
well as existing sources of information, delivering information to users from every source
that's relevant to them. Finally, these initiatives ensure that users who need information
have access to it, whether they're using computers plugged in to walls or getting quality
time on their favorite airline.
Initiatives are one thing, but the application of specific technologies is another. The
appendix in this book, Technology Roadmap, describes how Microsoft positions each of
its products in typical knowledge-management architectures. How do Microsoft
Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server fit into a knowledge-management scenario? What
products do you need to evaluate and deploy in order to build a knowledge-management
solution for business analysis? These are the types of questions that the appendix
answers.

Partnering for Success

Knowledge-management principles and technologies are revolutionary. Are you
convinced that you need to implement them in your company? Perhaps, but knowing and
doing are different things. No two companies are alike because they use different steps
to get there, and they apply the technology in different ways. Moreover, although
Microsoft sells an innovative platform for knowledge management, you'll probably need
to look elsewhere for help with assembling the building blocks. Few companies have all
the resources required to implement knowledge management; most need outside help to
meet their requirements.

Microsoft helps. You can build on existing investments in technology, implementing

knowledge management incrementally. Add the bits that meet pressing business needs
first; then, build on those with technologies that add value to your solution. Microsoft
helps implement those priorities by providing a flexible technology platform for
knowledge management, by supporting an open architecture that allows companies to
integrate new technologies with existing ones, and by continuously improving Microsoft
Windows so that companies can adapt to growth and change quickly and inexpensively.

Equally important, Microsoft helps by fostering a premier network of partners that provide
specific line-of-business solutions. This network provides businesses of all sizes a choice
of partners that understand their particular business needs. By making such a wide
range of choices available, Microsoft ensures that companies such as yours get the best
solutions for their particular requirements. For these purposes, partners fit into one of the
following categories:
ƒ Systems Integrators (SIs) design custom systems, from networks to
specialized computers, using products from various hardware vendors.
KPMG is an example.
ƒ Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) create applications for narrowly defined
line-of-business needs and markets. Cipher Systems and ChangePoint are
examples.
ƒ Solution Providers (SPs) assemble software to create best-of-breed systems.
Forte Systems and Software Spectrum are examples.

Snapper and ECMS

Snapper tried to implement a knowledge-management solution. They built a sales-force

automation system, but, according to a company spokesperson, "It was a total disaster.
The system ... was taking up an unbelievable amount of disk space, causing us to
continuously upgrade everyone's computers. Also, the information in it was inconsistent
and often wrong. Finally, the application was so complex that it was very expensive to
maintain." Snapper recruited the help of Enterprise Communication and Messaging
Solutions from Columbia, South Carolina. The result of their efforts was a sales-force
automation system based on Microsoft Exchange that allows customer demand and field
sales to drive production.

Partners such as Enterprise Communication and Messaging Solutions focus on

particular aspects of knowledge management: workflow management, collaboration, or
other technologies. They have more expertise, passion, and knowledge about their core
competencies than companies trying to be all things to all people, and they certainly
build better solutions than companies trying to do it all. Microsoft provides the platform,
and partners combine the building blocks into complete knowledge-management
solutions. You benefit with a lower total cost of ownership, increased interoperability, and
an accelerated return on your investment.
Solution Providers

Microsoft Certified Solution Providers are companies that Microsoft certifies to offer
services and solutions built using Microsoft products. The strict requirements for joining
this program guarantee that you're working with highly qualified professionals. They
provide a variety of products and services, including consulting, training, technical
support, systems integration, product implementation, and custom application
development. Locating an MCSP for your business is easy. Do one of the following:
ƒ Visit http://www.microsoft.com/referral.
ƒ Visit http://www.microsoft.com/industry to locate MCSPs that provide
products and services for your particular industry.
ƒ Call (800) SOLPROV in the United States and Canada. Outside the
United States and Canada, contact the nearest Microsoft subsidiary.
Not all MCSPs get knowledge management, but Microsoft does maintain a network of
those that do. Open http://www.microsoft.com/industry in your Web browser. This Web
page lists a variety of partners who understand knowledge management, and it
describes the industries for which they provide goods and services. Additionally, it shows
which technologies of those described in Part III, "Technology"and which Microsoft
products each partner understands." Many partners can help with other aspects of your
infrastructure, too, including electronic commerce and business operations.

Sources of Information
For more about Microsoft's knowledge-management initiatives, see
http://www.microsoft.com/business and http://www.microsoft.com/industry. Several
books give knowledge management more academic treatments, and I refer to them
often:
ƒ Corporate Memory: Strategies for Knowledge Management (Intellectual
Capital Services) (Dimension Publishing)
ƒ Sense and Respond: Capturing Value in the Network Era (Harvard Business
School Press)
ƒ Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Harvard
Business School Press)
ƒ Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Harvard
Business School Press)
Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know is the ultimate
academic guide to knowledge management. This book analyzes knowledge
management as a business science. Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak are
two highly respected authors with visionary insight into knowledge management in the
business world. This is the one knowledge-management book I keep by my side.
Note that much of Knowledge Management Strategies is based on Microsoft white
papers and case studies. Its purpose is to describe Microsoft's vision for knowledge
management, after all. For the case studies you see in this book, you can often find more
detail and more complete case studies on Microsoft's Web site or from your Microsoft
account representative. For more information about the case studies in this book, I refer
you to the two URLs near the beginning of this section.

Moving Forward
This book is your wakeup call. I'm encouraging you to evaluate your company's
knowledge-management system and, more specifically, your company's need for
knowledge-management systems that empower your knowledge workers. British
Petroleum, HarperCollins Publishers, Motorola, Nabisco, Siemens Business Services,
and many other companies join Snapper in leading the way to smarter, more nimble
businesses that no longer think inside out. These companies are more responsive to
customers, employees, and suppliers. Best of all, these companies are all thriving.
Before continuing, diagnose your company's ability to metabolize knowledge, by asking
these questions:
ƒ Do you learn, from anywhere in the company, about bad news quickly?
ƒ Can you assemble virtual teams from separate departments and
geographies?
 ƒ Can you capture and analyze customer feedback electronically?
ƒ Can you quickly deliver customer feedback to employees who can fix
problems?
ƒ Can you capture and analyze customer-buying patterns?
ƒ Can you determine which groups of customers are most profitable for you?
ƒ Do you adjust production to meet demand on a daily basis? Weekly?
Monthly?
ƒ Can you collaborate with your customers and vendors?

In this book, I don't burden you with techno-babble that requires a computer dictionary to
translate. This book is at the 10,000-foot level for senior IT decision makers and line-of-
business people. Senior IT decision makers are responsible for identifying strategic
applications for the business and aligning IT with fundamental business processes; they
include chief information officers and vice presidents and their direct reports who are
responsible for IT strategies. Line-of-business people are interested in how IT solutions
maximize business efficiencies. I do make some assumptions about you, however. You
understand basic networking concepts. You understand the role of the IT department
and its infrastructure. You're familiar with current technology, its trends, and recent
developments. I don't assume that you're familiar with deploying specific products and
technologies, however.
My hope is that this book will help you better understand your company's needs and how
you can apply Microsoft products to those needs. If I've done my job well, this book will
leave you with many more questions than you had before reading it. I encourage you to
send them to me at jerry@honeycutt.com. I'm fascinated by how companies use
Microsoft technologies and will consider your stories for future editions of this book.

Part I: Organization
Chapter List
Chapter 1: Knowledge Sources
Chapter 2: Organizational Barriers

Chapter 1: Knowledge Sources

Overview
Knowledge hides in people's minds and in the company's processes; finding and tapping
into your company's knowledge sources is your first big hurdle.

Knowledge management turns experience and information into results. According to

sources at British Petroleum, knowledge is inexpensive and easy to replicate, but
capturing it is not. In other words, identifying the knowledge sources to capture in a
knowledge-management system is tricky; therefore, I address this issue right up front in
this book.

This chapter suggests where you should begin. It describes a possible needs
assessment. It identifies personal, team, corporate, and external knowledge sources,
and it recommends specific situations that you must improve in order to build a
successful knowledge-management system. For example, a fractured infrastructure, one
in which clients don't interoperate well, should be a top priority for improvement. Another
example of resources that require improvement is islands of information, where users in
one part of the company can't exchange knowledge with users in another part of the
company. Last, this chapter closes by making some recommendations for how to
capture these knowledge sources in your knowledge-management system. This chapter
assumes no technical wizardry, as it speaks to these issues on a 10,000-foot level.
 Design Goals
A successful knowledge-management design has the following goals (see Figure 1-1 for
an illustration):
ƒ Focus on the critical information With so much information coming from so
many sources, knowledge workers often spend hours sorting through
various materials in order to find one key point. A knowledge-management
system helps solve information overload by delivering focused, vital
business messages through the use of filters, user-specified categories,
and summaries. Vital, high-level information can be accessed through
relevant business reports.
ƒ Integrate information from a variety of sources A knowledge-management
system integrates information from a variety of sources. Key business
messages from corporate applications, Internet and intranet sites, team
folders, and personal files can all be organized and viewed easily on a well-
designed system.
ƒ Leverage the knowledge of others Knowledge-management systems
enable knowledge workers to leverage what each other knows. As
corporations become more global, collaboration increases in difficulty.
Whether located in the office next door or on another continent, workers
can use the system to locate and communicate with experts, collaborate on
projects, or research corporate presentations and docu-ments. Digital
dashboards, which you learn about in Chapter 7, rely on Microsoft
collaboration tools.
ƒ Work with the same information, in the office or on the move Knowledge
management enables knowledge workers to make efficient and effective
business decisions regardless of location. Nearly 44 million people traveled
for business in 1998, up 14 percent from 1994, and the average business
trip lasted about 2.5 days (The Road Not Taken, Bronwyn Fryer, Inc.
Magazine Technology #2, 1999). All this travel means that knowledge
workers are often away from their company's networks, their teams, their
customers, and the Web. With digital dashboards built using Microsoft
tools, information from any source, including favorite Web sites and shared
public folders, can be viewed and used with or without an Internet
connection.

Figure 1-1: Knowledge-management goals.

Needs Assessments
Needs assessment is a balancing act between managing end-user needs and
maintaining the overall business strategy of the project. The needs-assessment part of
the process is often conducted in tandem with researching the available information
resources in order to assure a rapid development process, so I discuss it up front.
Knowledge-management systems are an excellent way to bring together information and
business applications from disparate sources in an integrated, customizable, and
interactive environment. Needs assessment aims to clarify which information resources
will yield the greatest impact as a part of the system.
Knowledge-management projects tend to start with a very limited focus and then grow.
The focus of the project will determine its chances for success. Too often, as additional
stakeholders (see Chapter 2, "Organizational Barriers", to learn about building a team of
stakeholders) provide requirements and specifications, the project becomes increasingly
complex, and cultural issues begin to pile up. This added complexity often makes it
difficult or impossible to deliver an end-to-end system in a reasonable time. In addition,
these projects often involve multiple iterations, so it is important to focus on those
components that add the most value. The important thing is to not let the project get out
of hand.

Knowledge Management Advisor

IT Advisor for Knowledge Management helps you evaluate your company's knowledge-
management systems. It focuses on three key aspects of these systems: people and
the value of their knowledge; processes, technologies, and their value; and business
relationships, including customers and partners, and their value. This tool walks you
through needs assessment and planning in order to help your company make the best
use of its existing and future technology investments.

At http://www.microsoft.com/solutions/km, Microsoft provides IT Advisor for Knowledge

Management free of charge. Note that two versions of the advisor are available. The
first is an online version. The second is the Desktop Edition of IT Advisor for
Knowledge Management. The latter is the most useful, as you can refer to it over time
and don't have to rely on access to Microsoft's Web site to use it.

I recommend that you go no further in your processes before walking through the
advisor. It's also useful to keep it around and to update its contents as your company
progresses. Also, make sure you look at the help files for additional needs assessment
and planning information. I tell you this only because the program is easy to use, and
you'd probably not venture into the help system otherwise.

Business Goals
Because Microsoft's knowledge-management technologies are so flexible, the
temptation to solve every problem and present every type of information in a knowledge-
management system can lead to feature creep and a lack of focus. By clearly laying out
which business objectives need to be supported by a knowledge-management system,
you guide the needs assessment, prioritizing components. A system built on clearly
defined business goals can, in the long term, reinforce business priorities to users. For
example, if a particular business metric—such as customer satisfaction in a particular
market segment or an
organizational value such as training—is highlighted throughout a knowledge-
management system, users will have these company initiatives in the forefront of their
minds.

Business Processes

Although a demonstration of sample digital dashboards and open brainstorming helps

generate ideas for content, considering the types of information used frequently helps
prioritize those ideas. To identify these, walk through the various business processes of
decision-making, and ask, "What pieces of information are needed to make different
decisions?" Boiling it down to this level forces people to consider what information is
absolutely necessary. The following characteristics are hallmarks of information that is
useful in a knowledge-management system:
ƒ Information that is used consistently
ƒ Information with strategic relevance
ƒ Alerts where timeliness is of the essence
ƒ Paperless storage areas that are accessed frequently, such as a forms
library

Usage Characteristics

Once the types of information are identified for inclusion in a knowledge-management

system, focus on how the information is used. Usage characteristics are the final aspect
of needs assessment. The results of the usage characteristics assessment will have the
most profound effect on the technical architecture of the solution. In addition, a failure to
meet this set of needs will certainly result in inconsistent usage of a knowledge-
management system. Consider the following issues to determine how the various
sources and types of information are used:
ƒ Does the information need to be available offline? This will depend on
the job classification of the individual end users. Make sure that the pilot
group reflects the needs of the corporation as a whole in this need.
Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server,
and Internet Explorer provide the ability to take virtually any information
offline.
ƒ Is the information read-only? While a knowledge-management system
built using Microsoft products dynamically enables knowledge workers to
find information easily, it is advisable to limit the ability to write to certain
information sources. If all the underlying applications have been written
to the Windows Distributed Networking Architecture (DNA) and support
the security model of the Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000
operating systems, access rights will not be an issue. Environments with
heterogeneous security methodologies can be difficult for users,
requiring them to log into multiple applications.
ƒ Must the user be able to change data when offline? If data needs to be
posted offline, a methodology needs to be derived for storing the entered
data offline before it is synchronized to the server. Outlook, Exchange
Server, and SQL Server support this type of data entry and can be
synchronized with other databases to ensure data integrity between
information stores.
ƒ How current does the data need to be? Very often, up-to-the-minute data
is not as important as having availability offline. While Microsoft products
support up-to-the-second information gathering and distri-bution, network
bandwidth, financial-information security, and client storage capacities
are tradeoffs that need to be considered.
ƒ How must the information be customized and to what degree? The type
of information—such as personal or business information—might dictate
the extent of customization. Personal information, such as e-mail and
day-to-day project files, generally requires a high level of customization
based on geography and personal preferences, while business
information can generally be customized based on the user's
organizational role. Also, the extent of customization depends on the
users' ability to manipulate how information is seen and its arrangement.
Finally, filtering of information based on target audiences and
organization of information sources also play into this issue of usage.

User Needs
The greatest challenge might be in educating the sponsor, stakeholders, and pilot group
on the opportunities offered by a knowledge-management solution. For example, most
people are unaware of the rich data-analysis capabilities in the combination of Office
2000 and SQL Server 7. Therefore, it is important to demonstrate the variety of
capabilities at the beginning of needs assessment. A good starting point for the needs
assessment is the Digital Dashboard Starter Kit, which provides a set of sample digital
dashboards for a variety of different roles and industries. For more information, see
Chapter 7, "Digital Dashboard". Using examples specific to the company's industry
engages participants and provokes further investigation into the solution.

Depending on the organization, the types of information and functionality of a

knowledge-management system will vary. Some specific examples include:
ƒ Automated notification of events based on strategic goals
ƒ Relevant industry news
ƒ Financial reporting with in-depth analysis
ƒ Project tracking and reminders
ƒ A specific line-of-business application such as sales-force automation
ƒ Customer information—both external and internal
ƒ Business analysis
ƒ Personal calendar, electronic mail, and tasks
ƒ Weather, traffic, and other external news feeds that might affect business

The following chapter, Organizational Barriers, also recommends that you add lifestyle
information to the knowledge-management system. This type of information can
encourage people to use the system.

Information Resources
In most cases, much of the information that is needed to produce a good first-generation
knowledge-management project already exists within a company. Companies must be
able to present information in an interactive and integrated manner. In some cases,
existing information infrastructure can be enhanced to deliver significant business value
at a minimal additional cost.

It is essential to work with stakeholders and information-resource owners to identify

information assets that can be tapped. Most information sources can be found within the
company. Often these resources reside somewhere on a mainframe or in a data
warehouse. In other cases, the information may be in a semi-structured format or on the
Web.

Collaborate with information-resource owners to get buy-in and assistance with

operational, host integration, and support issues. Information-resource owners will often
play a key role in planning ongoing support and administration of a knowledge-
management infrastructure. Furthermore, information-resource owners are often helpful
in determining and discovering where the best data/information sources are located and
in what format.

A knowledge-management system is not just one system or one application. It is an

integrated view of multiple applications. It is an intuitive, flexible tool that uses Internet
standards to deliver data access, collaboration, and analysis applications to knowledge
workers. When evaluating what types of information to include on a digital dashboard,
make sure to look at broad categories of applications to get a mix of all the items that a
knowledge worker uses during the day.

Personal
Knowledge workers tend to keep a large amount of information on their hard drives for
reasons of privacy and security. The most common items are e-mail and calendar items.
These items never appear on traditional server portals, and this differentiates a digital-
dashboard solution built using Microsoft products from a run-of-the-mill portal. By taking
advantage of Outlook Today (see Chapter 7, "Digital Dashboard"), it is quite easy to
include personal information.
Team

To foster innovation, teams are working increasingly across organizational and

geographic boundaries. Exchange Server helps capture what these teams learn and
facilitates collaboration among dispersed teams. Knowledge-management systems built
on Outlook 2000 provide knowledge workers access to the tools they need to share
documents, discussions, tasks, and other productivity tools.

Team information resources can vary from ad hoc sharing of documents and discussions
to more structured, process-based applications. All of these applications can be included
in a knowledge-management system. In addition to capturing shared information, a
knowledge-management system can take advantage of tools such as NetMeeting, with
which people can collaborate face-to-face over an intranet or the Internet, and Windows
Media Services, which is particularly useful for broadly distributing training material and
sharing best practices.

Corporate

Corporate information systems store much of the most crucial information that can be
included in a knowledge-management system. These information systems are
distinguished from other resources because they are usually controlled by the IT group
and have a highly organized system of maintenance and security. The presence of
legacy data and the massive requirements placed on these systems makes corporate
information resources the most difficult to deal with. The payoff for working through this
information is a greater understanding of the business, its markets, and its customers.

Unfortunately, knowledge workers are often inundated with paper-based weekly,

monthly, and quarterly reports from these systems, which are often mainframe- or ERP-
based systems. These paper-based reports are expensive in many respects. They do
not allow customization. Readers cannot easily locate data. Worst of all, there is not a
way to intelligently filter information based on business rules to alert people of problems
or opportunities. If you move these systems into tools such as Office 2000 and Office
Web Components, they can provide more interactive reporting and the value of these
resources can be realized.
Various lines of business require different performance metrics. Traditional sales and
marketing organizations need to slice and dice sales and profitability figures by each
product, part, region, and individual. Conversely, a manufacturing firm will focus its
performance measurements on yield, throughput, cycle time, and inventory levels.
Today's Internet firms have introduced new measurements such as unique visitors,
reach, average minutes per month, and pages viewed per day.

External

Knowledge workers must stay abreast of world events, publications, legislative affairs,
and competitors. Resources of information can be a dynamic repository of hyperlinks, a
news and stock ticker scrolling across the screen, a targeted news wire that covers a
specific industry, or a bulletin board or issue forum. With knowledge-management
systems based on Office 2000 and Web standards, integration of external content such
as news feeds is a very easy task. Due to the broad availability and variety of external
information, a customization engine such as that on MSN is often advisable.

Resource Improvement
Many significant issues will arise when working with corporate information resources, as
these are the most complex resources and often housed in legacy systems. Great
strides have been made to improve the tools available for solving some of these issues.
Minor upgrades to information systems can often yield significant increases in the
usability of information. The following sections address these issues:
ƒ Information islands
ƒ Poor reporting
 ƒ Fractured infrastructures
ƒ No common taxonomy
These sections also mention a number of technologies that you learn about later in this
book. For more information, see Chapter 8, "Microsoft Exchange Web Storage System".

Information Islands
One of the most common problems is that information is stored in multiple systems
across a corporation (see Figure 1-2 on the next page). Depending on the type of
information, various tools are available for consolidating information across a wide
variety of systems. For example:
ƒ Accounting, customer, and other line-of-business data This type of
data is often stored in a variety of systems. In large corporations,
accounting data from different divisions might even be in different
systems. SQL Server includes a feature called Data Transformation
Services (DTS), which consolidates data from a variety of modern and
legacy databases, thereby enabling better reporting and easier
understanding of the business as a whole. This service can also reduce
the expensive and time-consuming process of manually rolling-up
financial reporting. The DTS Package Designer provides a graphical
environment for working with data in a variety of systems.
ƒ Documents, discussions, and Web pages This type of informa- tion is
generally more dispersed than corporate data as it is generated in a
more ad hoc fashion. Microsoft Site Server includes a sophisticated
mechanism that can search across documents, discussions, internal and
external Web sites, and SQL Server databases. With this capability,
knowledge workers can confidently search across the entire corporate
memory. Once this type of cross-company catalog is established, it is
easy to integrate into a digital dashboard.

Figure 1-2: Information islands.

Poor Reporting

As discussed earlier, paper-based reporting is inadequate for moving through large

amounts of data to spot trends. The combination of Office 2000 and SQL Server allows
knowledge workers to connect directly to business data and conduct any number of
sophisticated analyses. The Microsoft Online Analytical Processing (MSOLAP)
technology enables this sophisticated and flexible analysis. With the MSOLAP features
included in SQL Server and Microsoft Excel, knowledge workers can use familiar tools to
conduct sophisticated analyses of corporate data.

Fractured Infrastructure

When knowledge workers need to communicate with subject matter experts or their
teammates, a fractured collaboration and messaging system should not get in the way.
E-mail, discussion, and shared document folders are the most efficient way of
communicating in today's mobile and global environment. Exchange Server provides a
scalable platform that can grow to support any sized organization's messaging and
collaboration needs in a consistent seamless fashion. In addition, teams can use tools
such as the Microsoft Team Folders Wizard to build and deploy team-based applications
that are built on the same central Exchange-based e-mail infrastructure. This guarantees
that knowledge workers get the resources they need to get their jobs done efficiently.

No Common Taxonomy

The most significant roadblock to the effective integration of information resources for
knowledge-management systems is the lack of a common way of labeling or tagging
information. Often, one business unit may call a metric by a name that differs
substantially from that used by another part of the organization. A similar problem occurs
when two departments refer to two metrics by the same name. This is usually a cultural
problem. The best way to get this resolved is to work to a common taxonomy. However,
in some cases this kind of information can be stored in a person's profile and display the
information in their taxonomy of choice.

Development
Development methodology is best left to your IT department, and this chapter doesn't
address this topic in detail. It does discuss some issues that are critical to a successful
implementation of a knowledge-management system, though, so that you're asking the
right questions when you talk to the IT department. First and foremost is documentation.
Documentation is a fundamental component of any development project, especially how
data and information are linked together. These data flow processes and their underlying
data models must be thoroughly documented, including the timing of the information as it
moves from location to location.

There are three key roles in implementing knowledge-management systems. Depending

on the amount of work that is needed on the information resources, responsibilities can
be shared across the roles. The first role is focused on finding, normalizing, and
preparing information resources for inclusion in a system. Another role is focused on
developing or refining the four to five applications that are components of the system.
Finally, the third role attends to the user interface representation, user interface
extensibility, and offline synchronization.
Development will take place in a series of steps. As prototypes and betas are shown to
users and stakeholders, additional requirements are defined, taxonomies are refined,
and a general consensus on business priorities is reached. Early in the process, more
attention is paid to the presentation of the information; in later revisions, there is a slightly
higher emphasis on data issues in order to compensate for the greater emphasis on user
interface issues in the first stages. The last stage prior to deployment is testing. Testing
of a knowledge-management system is a little different from that for most classes of
applications and, because this is also a cultural issue and closely related to the project's
stakeholders, I address this topic in the following chapter, "Organizational Barriers."

Getting the Right Help

Going forward with knowledge management, your company will build expertise. Having
the expertise in your IT department in advance is not likely, so you'll need help
planning and implementing your plans. Learn from other companies' experiences.
Many companies comment in case studies that they had a number of false starts, as
many as three major efforts failing, before bringing in outside help. In most of these
cases, the primary reason for the initial failures was that the company just didn't have
the knowledge base required to implement a successful knowledge-management
 system. Whether you're evaluating Microsoft products or not, you need a good
knowledge base.

Microsoft makes finding help easy through its Microsoft Certified Solution Provider
(MCSP) program. To qualify for this program, third-party companies must employ
Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCPs) who have demonstrated a level of technical
expertise that allows them to develop and deliver solutions based on Microsoft
products. Microsoft judges an MCP's competence by using certification exams that the
company develops. These consultants receive the same training that Microsoft
provides its own engineers, so they are well acquainted with Microsoft products and
how to best deploy them in a variety of scenarios. They also have full access to
Microsoft's development and product support groups; therefore, they can respond
quickly. MCPs run the gamut from Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers (MCSEs),
who are essential network and operating system gurus, to Microsoft Certified Trainers
(MCTs), who are certified to teach others about Microsoft products.

Microsoft's Business site, http://www.microsoft.com/business, has an MCSP locator

that helps you locate the best MCSP for your needs. The locator asks you a variety of
questions, including the size of your infrastructure and the type of solution you're
planning, and then recommends MCSPs in your area. It's up to you to interview and
choose the right MCSP, however, as they're independent companies that are beyond
Microsoft's influence. This site also includes information about how to interview and
choose an MCSP—valuable information, particularly for smaller businesses that
usually have only one shot at getting things right.

Wrap Up

Knowledge management is about leveraging the corporate memory and, in order to

accomplish that goal, the project must identify and improve the company's various
knowledge sources. Here are this chapter's highlights regarding knowledge sources:
ƒ Needs assessments help you identify the goals for your knowledge-
management project as well as the various knowledge sources it must
capture.
ƒ Information sources include personal, team, corporate, and external.
Knowledge-management systems built on Microsoft products provide
flexible solutions for capturing knowledge from all of these information
sources.
ƒ Your company must improve some resources including those in
information islands or that are limited due to a fractured infrastructure.
Poor reporting and a lack of a common taxonomy are also problems that
a knowledge-management system must improve.

Taking Stock
1. Where is the information and knowledge in your organization?
2. What are you trying to accomplish with a knowledge-management
system?
3. What processes are you trying to improve with a knowledge-
management system?
4. Do users have specific needs that a knowledge-management system
must address?
5. Do knowledge-workers have particular usage patterns such as offline
usage for which the knowledge-management system must account?
 6. Is your corporate data and information well defined? Do all of the
company's IT departments use the same taxonomy for that data and
information?8.
7. Are your departments well connected so that they can share
information?
8. Are users artificially separated by a fractured infrastructure?

Action Plan
ƒ Informally or otherwise, identify the goals you're trying to achieve.
ƒ With the help of your IT department, conduct a needs assessment.
ƒ Identify the personal, team, corporate, and external sources of
informa-tion that must be in the company's knowledge-management
system.
ƒ Identify and plan to improve information islands, poor reporting
systems, fractured infrastructures, and weak taxonomies.
ƒ Cooperate with your IT department to create a development plan.

Chapter 2: Organizational Barriers

Overview
To facilitate the success of knowledge management in your company, break down
cultural barriers in its way: hoarding, resistance, and so on.
Knowledge-management systems depend on companies' cultures and how well those
cultures support the efforts of the people who produce the information in them. High-
value content that an empowered staff produces is more useful in a knowledge-
management system than the drivel that employees produce due to cultures that don't
support sharing ideas openly and obviously. In addition, the more expensive human
resources a company has or the more dependence a company has on sharing and
reusing information, the greater benefit the company receives from fostering cooperation,
instead of rewarding knowledge hoarding or resistance to change. That's the first key for
breaking down organizational barriers to knowledge management: reward positive
behavior, not negative behavior.
To that end, knowledge management is largely about people. Culture and behavior is
important. You must encourage employees to take the time to learn before jumping on
new tasks, for example. You've heard it before: Reward failure so that you encourage
employees to take risks. So, as you read this chapter, keep in mind that technology
enables knowledge-management systems, but knowledge management is just as much
about leadership (yours), culture, and behavior. You must create a culture that is
conducive to sharing information, finding it, and creating knowledge. This chapter points
you in the right direction. It helps you overcome some of the most common cultural
barriers, particularly those witnessed in Microsoft case studies. You can find a fuller
treatment of this subject in Working Knowledge by Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence
Prusak (Harvard Business School Press, 1998). Leading business books also help you
overcome cultural barriers to technology in general.
Figure 2-1 shows an overview of the processes you can use to avoid certain classes of
cultural problems. The idea is to get users involved early and, as the system evolves,
create a feedback loop that captures corporate and user requirements.
Figure 2-1: Preventing cultural barriers to knowledge management.

Focusing on Users
An overriding principle is collaboration with the people who will use your company's
knowledge-management system. Throughout the case studies you read about in this
book, an essential ingredient to success is communication with users. For example,
British Petroleum, one of the largest petrochemical companies in the world, gave users
information about why the company was deploying its knowledge-management system.
It used newsletters and road shows. It published deployment plans and technical
standards. It educated its users. After the company implemented its system, it gave
users even more information over an intranet and a half- or one-day training course that
taught them how to use their new system. Before dropping knowledge management in
users' laps, the company answered the big five journalistic questions—who, what, how,
why, and where—eliminating surprises.
Communication with users will yield all sorts of feedback. You'll hear about the
importance of usability. Employees won't use the word usability, however. They might
express uneasiness about learning a new system or they might balk at the change.
When they do anything like this, they're pleading for you not to create a system that sets
them up for failure, whatever failure means to them. The following sections address
some of the feedback you might hear and ways you can focus on users as you plan a
knowledge-management system. For example, most users are primarily concerned with
filtering information so that they get what they need, without all the noise. Other users
might be more drawn to your knowledge-management solution if you include
personalized information in it, such as weather and traffic reports. The success of public
Internet portals, such as MSN and Yahoo, illustrates how important personalization is to
users.

British Petroleum Snapshot

British Petroleum recruited the Microsoft Certified Solution Provider Digitalpeople to

help the company become more responsive, to increase employee productivity, to
create a "true learning organization", and to lower the cost of ownership. British
Petroleum's knowledge-management solution included 33,000 desktop computers
"including IBM and Dell computers", 500 workstations, and 1500 servers "including
 Compaq and Dell servers". On these systems, British Petroleum deployed a range of
Microsoft operating systems, productivity applications, server products, Internet
applications, and development tools, including the following:

Operating ƒ Microsoft Windows 95

Systems
ƒ Microsoft NT Workstation 4.0

ƒ Microsoft NT Server 4.0

Productivity ƒ Microsoft Schedule+ 7.5

Applications
ƒ Microsoft Office 95 7.0b

ƒ Microsoft Office Professional 95 7.0b

ƒ Microsoft Project 4.1a

Internet ƒ Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02

Tools
Development ƒ Microsoft FrontPage 95 and later
Tools
ƒ Microsoft Visual Studio

Server ƒ Microsoft Exchange 5.0

Products
ƒ Microsoft Proxy Server 1.2

ƒ Microsoft SNA Server 1.0

ƒ Microsoft SQL Server 6.5

ƒ Microsoft Systems Management Server 1.2

Making It Easy to Use

Usability is probably one of the greatest barriers to a successful knowledge-management

system. A difficult-to-use system sets knowledge workers up to fail. According to Mark
Post, director of global knowledge management technology development at KPMG, a
knowledge-management solution must allow people to easily access the knowledge and
information they need, when they need it—or they simply won't use the system. KPMG
had to shift its corporate mindset from one of knowledge hoarding to one of knowledge
sharing to ensure its success. "Knowledge management needs to be integrated into
everything that everyone does; it needs to become part of the way we work," says
Michael Turillo, KPMG's international chief knowledge officer.

To facilitate that cultural change, KPMG created an easy-to-use, Web-based knowledge

portal called KWorld. This unified interface provides buttons that allow KPMG employees
to navigate quickly to news stories and KPMG's internal content; to the Microsoft Outlook
messaging and e-mail client for e-mail, scheduling, and task management; and to
Microsoft NetMeeting conferencing software for real-time document sharing or
videoconferencing. In the KWorld environment of messaging, knowledge sharing, and
collaboration, we're able to get the right people collaborating and working together in a
very powerful way, says Turillo. Because the company created a system that is so easy
to use, the chances of its success are good: KPMG employees are likely to use the
system and actually begin to depend on it.

Usability is a discussion that's far beyond the scope of this book and one that's best left
to your IT department. Microsoft is one of the best examples of a company that builds
successful, usable products, though; you can learn a lot of concepts just by using the
company's products. Also, numerous books on the subject are available at your local
bookstore, including a few from Microsoft Press. A final note: If you involve actual users
in the process from the get-go, you're likely to build a usable knowledge-management
system. Feedback is the best indicator for usability.

Handling the Big Changes

Usability is one thing, but what about those users from whom which you're pulling out the
rug? Big changes for those users include your taking away software, changing their mail
clients, or even changing their platforms. A more extreme example is taking over
management of non-managed desktops, a process that requires adjustment for
everyone involved. In these cases, users are going to express initial concern, but
communication and participation will get most of them past these hurdles. Be patient.
Some users will never make it over these hurdles, however. As harsh as it sounds, this
might be a good time to replace employees who don't adapt well, particularly in fast-
paced business climates.

KPMG is an example where big changes went over well. Responses to the new system
were varied, particularly in parts of the company that were heavy Macintosh users. They
were concerned about moving to PCs. The company proved these concerns unjustified,
however, as the customer-satisfaction surveys exceeded 98 percent and internal
measures of service availability exceeded 99 percent. "They don't miss their old
Macintosh machines any more," says Neil Ashton, who leads BP's Information
Technology Architecture and Strategy group. "Broadly speaking, the users understood
the value of standardization and common ways of working. In particular, they knew that it
would lead to better service and support, so that there was generally very good buy-in to
the changes. We enjoyed executive support at the most senior levels, which is critical in
a project like this."

A key to British Petroleum's success was communicating the reasons for and the value
of these changes to users. Once they understood how important interoperability was to
the success of the knowledge-management system, everyone got onboard. Telling is
one thing, but showing was another. After users witnessed for themselves how the
system would improve their lives—users saw dramatic improvements in the e-mail
system's reliability, for example—they never looked back.

Addressing Personal Needs

The previous chapter, "Knowledge Sources", described how to perform a needs
assessment so that your knowledge-management system captures the right information
sources. To some degree, that has less to do with identifying the information required to
run your business and more to do with drawing users into your portal. Although it does
seem tangential, lifestyle information encourages employees to use your knowledge-
management system on a regular basis. Information such as weather, sports scores, and
traffic reports make your knowledge-management portal attractive to its users. Such data
makes the site interesting and more practical for everyday life. Examples of lifestyle
information include the following:
ƒ Weather reports
ƒ Traffic reports
ƒ Stock tickers
ƒ Travel bulletins
ƒ Industry news
ƒ Announcements

As with all things, balance is tough to measure and tougher to achieve. Too much
lifestyle information can chew up network bandwidth or distract employees from their
responsibilities. How far you're willing to go with this depends on your distinct situation.
Some choices are common sense—don't encourage Internet-based radio by including
links to radio sites in your portal—but evaluating how much network bandwidth that part
of your portal uses will require the help of your IT department. In general, personalized
information should draw in users but not interfere with their jobs.
Personal Portals
Microsoft recently announced a personal knowledge-management portal for Outlook
2000. This portal works with MSNBC to provide updated news, weather, and business
information in Outlook Today, Outlook 2000's opening screen. In addition to this
personalized content, Outlook Today displays the user's schedule and task list. Still
other companies are jumping on the bandwagon by building innovative personal
knowledge-management portals with features such as advanced searching capabilities,
categorization of e-mail, and much more. For more information about personal portals,
visit http://www.microsoft.com/office.

Eliminating the Noise

When the word gets out that your company is implementing a knowledge-management
system and users learn that it will be based on Web technologies, you're going to get a
predictable reaction from some of them. They're used to the Internet and the fact that 90
percent of everything they see is noise. Filtering that noise in order to find useful nuggets
of information is difficult for anybody, no matter how well they know the Internet.
However, in a controlled system that's built for specific business goals, eliminating the
noise is easier, and you should communicate this fact.

J.D. Edwards didn't want to talk, analyze, or think about knowledge management to
death; it wanted to build a system that would deliver immediate results. And it certainly
didn't want to build an elaborate knowledge repository that nobody used. The company
wanted to build a well-integrated system that delivered the information that knowledge
workers needed to do their jobs while filtering out the rest. For J.D. Edwards, the first
step was to identify the people and processes that most directly generated revenue: the
sales team. Knowledge-management specialists spent months interviewing the sales
force, finding out what they need to know to do a better job every day. What did they
read? What did they bring to client meetings? How did they get product news? How did
they keep up with the competition? This was the stuff of a good knowledge-management
system.
The company's knowledge managers developed an enterprise-wide set of core
competencies for organizing the company's knowledge. The key to success was
organizing around topics, issues, and the information that people need to do their jobs.
But organizing knowledge this way was a challenge because it required cutting across
departmental boundaries. J.D. Edwards met this challenge by forming knowledge
centers, logical groupings of information that are independent of department origin. A
dedicated knowledge-management staff oversees the presentation of information within
each center. This staff reads, selects, tags, and directs information into the J.D. Edwards
Information Network. The company believes that this staff eliminates millions of
documents that would help no one in the company. Because employees are able to find
the information they need and no more, they can produce more positive results.
 J.D. Edwards Snapshot

J.D. Edwards used Microsoft Consulting Services and META Group to build its
knowledge-management solution. Their system puts all of the company's critical
information in a single location from which knowledge workers can get the right
information when they need it. The company is working smarter, working faster, and
providing better information to its employees and clients. J.D. Edwards' knowledge-
management system was built using the following products:

Operating Systems ƒ Microsoft Windows 95

ƒ Microsoft Windows NT
Workstation

ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Server 4

Productivity ƒ Microsoft Office 97

Applications
ƒ Microsoft Office 2000

ƒ Microsoft Internet Explorer 4

ƒ Microsoft Outlook 97

Development Tools ƒ Microsoft FrontPage

ƒ Microsoft Visual Studio

Server Products ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server 5

ƒ Microsoft Site Server 3

ƒ Microsoft SQL Server 7

ƒ Microsoft Systems Management

Server

Choosing a Pilot Group

From the beginning, getting the right people involved in designing the project is
important. Those choices set the tone for the entire project. And choosing the right group
of people to pilot the project is one of the most important decisions you will make. The
best group of users is usually determined by the culture of the company or organization.
Keep in mind that word travels fast and these users' initial experiences will get around to
employees who will be using the system later. Therefore, make it count.
Speed, momentum, and strategic relevance are three key issues to investigate when
considering the construction of a pilot group. Because knowledge-management systems
are related to so many other systems, both business and technological, it is important to
maintain focus when developing the pilot and learning from the experience. Choosing a
group with strategic stature in the organization can ensure that the project's success will
 be both visible and measurable. The sales department is a good example. Some general
pointers for identifying potential pilot groups include the following (illustrated in Figure 2-
2):
ƒ Select a visible group, as the pilot group can generate a greater cultural shift
with greater visibility. Although a knowledge-management system is not
exclusively an executive tool, the influence of executives makes them good
pilot candidates. However, because executives also have different needs
from those of knowledge workers, it is important to investigate the needs of
a more diverse group through a tandem pilot.
ƒ Choose a group that is representative of the strategic direction of the
company. Knowledge-management systems will often have a broad effect
on the way information gets delivered to the organization. Working with the
information and user communities that have the greatest potential value will
guarantee the best long-term impact.
ƒ Look for groups where valuable knowledge is being lost. For instance, a sales
group that does not properly capture information on customer visits and
winning sales strategies can serve as a pilot with a very measurable impact
on revenue.
ƒ Consider the types of information the group uses. If the information is stale,
erroneous, or held in antiquated systems, it can slow down a pilot
significantly.
ƒ Use multiple pilot sites in larger, more global organizations. Band-width,
cultural, and information issues in larger organizations differ greatly from
country to country, and not understanding these issues may hurt the long-
term effectiveness of the project.
ƒ Beware of groups with high barriers to sharing information. It is important to
determine, through background interviews, the levels of software
experience and skill, readiness for technology acceptance, and any
reluctance that may exist among key stakeholders. In many cases, the
owners of information or knowledge are hesitant to share. Once the
benefits of the pilot are realized, people will become more amenable to
sharing information.

Figure 2-2: Choosing pilot groups.

Sponsors

Enlisting a high-level sponsor—usually the CEO, president, or business-unit leader—is

imperative. Look toward the top of the company's organizational chart for a suitable
sponsor, one who can lead—perhaps you. A sponsor can help gather the necessary
resources for the project. A knowledge-management system should also be built for
these sponsors, primarily for cultural reasons. Sponsors who endorse and use
knowledge-management systems foster a collaborative, team-based approach to sharing
information and knowledge. They can remove many perceived risks of using the system.
They set an example.

Stakeholders

In addition to the pilot group of users and the sponsor, a working team of stakeholders
can provide motivation for implementing a knowledge-management system throughout
all levels of the project. A good number of stakeholders is between 5 and 10 people.
They include subject matter experts, usage characteristic experts, data/information
producers, and IT professionals. Too many stakeholders can make it hard to balance the
many needs of a large constituency, though. The stakeholder team includes the following
roles:
ƒ Business Owner Defines the strategic goals of the pilot and ensures
focus on the end goal of enhancing business productivity.
ƒ Technology Infrastructure Owner Gives perspective on the technical
development and maintenance of the systems and the long-term impact
of digital-dashboard solutions in the organization.
ƒ Pilot Group Representative Brings the knowledge workers' perspective
to the stakeholder team. This person should focus most on the difficulties
of adapting end users to the system rather than on the final benefits.
ƒ Information-Resource Owners Represents the people who manage
information resources that will be available on a digital dashboard.
Typical resources are customer-relationship information, accounting
data, and training and development content.

Smaller businesses often have more organic natures and less complex infrastructures. In
these situations, broad stakeholder teams are not necessary and pilot projects can be
managed in a more ad hoc fashion. Additionally, some individuals can fill more than one
of these roles in such organizations. Many companies have built successful knowledge-
management systems as grass-roots efforts, rather than well-organized projects with
complex lifecycles.

Prototyping the System

An early prototype of the knowledge-management system is extremely useful, especially
for getting people onboard early in the process. The development cost is somewhat
minimal, and a prototype helps to expose holes and inconsistencies in the information.
Those holes can be filled before the working system is constructed. Presenting the
prototype and findings to the stakeholder team in a group setting allows each member of
the team to see, for the first time, other members' preferences for business metrics and
application targets. By meeting as a group, stakeholders are less likely to accuse each
other of not understanding the key measurements of the business. In addition, a group
setting helps solidify the team agenda rather than allowing individuals to break off from
the group focus.

Demonstrating to End Users

This step of the process is intended to prepare the end user community for a new
knowledge-management system. Part of this step is to help end users prepare for the
necessary cultural transformation, and part is to prepare them for the technology
implementation. This step is the first opportunity for stakeholders to compare their vision
of the system to the needs of the end users. It allows users to better prepare for the
changes that are coming down the road, helping them feel more involved in the process.
If end users agree with the stakeholder vision, system adoption becomes much easier.
This process should have three components:
ƒ An outline of the high-level goals of the program and long-term vision.
ƒ A statement from the sponsor underlining the importance of sharing
knowledge to the company and a reiteration of how the system will improve
this function.
ƒ A demonstration of the knowledge-management system.
Organizations should not create the expectation that the first iteration of a knowledge-
management system is going to solve everyone's problems. Instead, they should focus
on how it can assist knowledge workers in solving certain classes of problems with
information delivery and collaboration. The demonstration typically shows four to five
example applications that will soon be put into production. The goal is to stimulate end
user thought about system application and how it might be extended to assist in solving
similar problems.

Ongoing Collaboration

Flashing around this new knowledge-management system is worthless unless the

stakeholders are open to feedback and criticism. In fact, consider formalizing the process
of showing the prototype and collecting feedback from users. That sends a powerful
message to knowledge workers: "We're building a knowledge-management system to
help you be more successful and we want you to help build it." Some companies collect
feedback about their knowledge-management system using a simple public folder. A
team composed of information-resource owners, support people, the sponsor, and the
development team can monitor discussions. This serves not only as a support
mechanism but also as a learning device for capturing the best and worst facets of a
digital dashboard for
later versions.

Reviews by Stakeholders

Throughout this process, it is important to assimilate the feedback from various groups,
to meet with stakeholders to review the knowledge-management system, to explore
reactions to the initial demonstration to end users, and to refine software presentation
and content. These design reviews should be attended by the entire stakeholder group in
order to maintain agreement regarding the major system-design goals and business
metrics.
Testing a digital-dashboard solution (see Chapter 7, "Digital Dashboard") is a little
different from testing most other classes of applications. The most likely source of error
(and the most troublesome to detect and correct) is in the quality and timeliness of
data/information compiled by the system. Therefore, it is critical to include subject-matter
experts as testers. This is because testers who are not subject-matter experts usually
cannot determine the difference between good information and bad information.
It is also important to have a trainer and at least one support person perform some of the
testing in order to begin familiarizing themselves with the system. Additional train the
trainer or train the support desk instruction might also be necessary. Depending on the
complexity of the system, end user documentation or some other instructional materials
might improve the success of your solution.

Wrap Up
Some companies have more significant barriers to overcome before they can
successfully deploy a knowledge-management system. Key ways you can overcome
these problems include the following:
ƒ Get users involved in the process early so that they buy in to it and they have
a chance to express their needs for the knowledge-management system.
ƒ Make the knowledge-management system easy to use to help ensure that
knowledge workers do indeed use the system.
ƒ On an ongoing basis, communicate with users so that you don't surprise them.
Make sure they understand the purpose and the importance of the system.
ƒ Address users' personal needs by adding lifestyle information to the
knowledge-management system, which draws users into it and makes it
more attractive.
ƒ Carefully choose a pilot group to test the system, realizing that this initial
group of users' impressions will affect how well the remaining users accept
it.
 ƒ Find a sponsor for the knowledge-management system who's in a position to
set an example for the rest of the company's knowledge workers.
ƒ Create a team of stakeholders that can guide the knowledge-management
project. Stakeholders include the sponsor, the business owner, the
technology-infrastructure owner, the pilot-group representative, and
information-resource owners.
ƒ Early in the process, demonstrate the new knowledge-management system to
users and collect their feedback so the company can improve the system.

Taking Stock
1. Does your company's culture reward knowledge hoarding?
2. Are your company's employees resistant to technology changes?
3. Can you leverage your company's existing culture to entice employees
to embrace your new knowledge-management system?
4. Have you identified a pilot group that will put your knowledge-
management system on solid footing during its early days?6.
5. Does your project have a sponsor? What about stakeholders?
6. Does your company regularly involve employees in major decisions,
such as deploying a knowledge-management system, or will this be a
cultural change?
Action Plan
ƒ Identify knowledge workers and processes that directly affect
revenue.
ƒ Talk with those users, getting them involved early in the process.
ƒ Prepare a newsletter or even regular events during which you discuss
the company's knowledge-management initiatives.
ƒ Single out a sponsor whose support will provide financing and set an
example for the rest of the company.
ƒ Identify key employees as stakeholders, and schedule regular
meetings with the stakeholder team so that they work as a group.
ƒ Develop a prototype for the system that helps you communicate
a vision.
ƒ Demonstrate the prototype and early versions of the knowledge-
management system to users and prepare to accept positive and
negative feedback.

Part II: Process

Chapter List
Chapter 3: Product Design
Chapter 4: Customer Management
Chapter 5: Employee Management
Chapter 6: Business Planning

Chapter 3: Product Design

Overview
Take better products and services to market with integrated groups of professionals;
knowledge management empowers product design.

A key to successfully designing products and services is collaboration across the

multiple groups of disciplines involved in the effort. Collaboration helps make sure that
the product or service meets the customer’s needs by capturing input from all of the
groups that have a stake in doing so or have valuable insight into that process. For
example, sales, marketing, engineering, design, and other groups can all share best
practices in design and development. Knowledge-management systems provide the
methodology as well as the best way to capture those best practices.
Some types of businesses are better suited to collaboration around product and service
design. These businesses are typically, but not always, technology businesses.
Consulting, research-and-development oriented, and engineering businesses are prime
examples. Historically, technology businesses have been early innovators and have
paved the way for others. Examples of businesses that aren’t technically oriented but still
benefit from collaboration include the food service and consumer goods industries. The
case studies in this chapter are from both segments, and the subjects are KPMG
International, a technology company, and Nabisco, a consumer goods company.
Collaboration brings ideas and information together to help projects move forward more
quickly and efficiently. People become more aware of what other people in the
organization know and don’t know. Ideas get around, reducing the duplication of effort
and increasing cooperation between departments. Some departments in some
organizations might not be so willing to share what they know, however. Chapter 2
discusses the techniques for working on that problem. Once you get knowledge
management working in your projects, the measure of its effectiveness includes product
success rates, changes in cycle times, and the amount of rework that must be done once
a project is finished. Keep these points in mind as you read the rest of this chapter.

Service Development
KPMG is evolving itself into a unified, global company with a mission to “turn knowledge
into value” for its international customers. Executives at KPMG realized that they needed
a highly scalable knowledge-management solution that would help the company reach
that goal and allow 100,000 employees in 160 countries to collaborate—even with offices
that are oceans apart. “Our business is all about information,” says KPMG CEO Paul
Reilly. “If we can’t demonstrate that we can manage the experience of our own people,
then we’re not showing clients a very good example of why they should hire us.”

KPMG asked Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) and Cisco Systems to help the
company create and deploy KWorld, a Web-based knowledge-management system that
combines technology with business practices. Executives at KPMG predict that KWorld
will help position the firm as a world leader in providing international tax, consulting,
financial advisory, and assurance services. “KWorld is the largest global investment our
firm has ever made,” says Reilly. “We’re betting our future that this is going to leap us
ahead of our competition.” KWorld is a primary example of how a service company can
use collaboration to offer more to customers.

KPMG Snapshot

KPMG built a knowledge-management solution that would differentiate itself from its
competitors. They wanted to lead by example. The solution, KWorld, allows knowledge
workers to leverage information from all of the company’s employees. The goal is to
make better, well-informed decisions and to unify the KPMG offices throughout the
world. With the help of Cisco Systems and Microsoft Consulting Services, KPMG’s
solution was built with the following products:

Operating Systems ƒ Microsoft

Windo
ws NT
Server
Productivity Applications ƒ Microsoft
Office
ƒ Microsoft
Interne
t
Explor
 er
ƒ Microsoft
Outloo
k
Server Products ƒ Microsoft
Excha
nge
Server
ƒ Microsoft
Site
Server
ƒ Microsoft
SQL
Server
Hardware Products ƒ Cisco
7500
Router
Series
ƒ Cisco
Cataly
st
Ethern
et
Switch
es

Setting an Example
KWorld has an easy-to-use, Web-based knowledge portal, which you learned about in
Chapter 2, “Organizational Barriers.” From the KWorld interface, people can tap into the
accumulated corporate knowledge of KPMG to get the content they need in the context
of the project on which they’re working. For example, as illustrated in Figure 3-1 on the
next page, a KPMG consultant assigned to a new project can log on to KWorld and
search for all consultants with expertise in a specific industry, technology, country—or all
three. The consultant can find relevant information to assist with proposals,
engagements, statistics, and reports, and the worker can read threaded discussions
about related topics. KWorld allows KPMG consultants to learn from the collective
experience of hundreds of thousands of skilled colleagues through a single, integrated
knowledge-management solution.

Providing Better Service

Working closely with MCS and Cisco, KPMG developed and deployed KWorld to 47,000
employees in just nine months. Although KWorld has been in place only since June
1999, KPMG executives have already noticed significant changes in how clients view the
firm’s services and how employees work with those customers. Before the KWorld
rollout, for example, KPMG found itself at a disadvantage against a competitor that said
it could provide better service than KPMG because of its collaborative solution. Those
tables have turned quickly
Figure 3-1 : KWorld.

and dramatically, thanks to KWorld. KWorld is now able to offer KPMG clients a
collaborative environment where client knowledge and KPMG knowledge can come
together to benefit both.

Employees embrace KWorld because it gives them the information they need when they
need it. In fact, according to Reilly, KPMG partners and employees around the world are
clamoring to be connected to KWorld, which had been deployed in four countries as of
the fall of 1999. As the company continues to deploy KWorld, executives expect to see a
remarkable change in the quality of KPMG goods and services. “Because of knowledge
management, we’re going to market with better products than we would otherwise have,
with better service, and with a more integrated group of professionals; people are able to
inform one another and engender an environment where their services are being refined
more quickly and responsively with regard to clients’ needs,” says Bernard Avishai,
director of intellectual capital at KPMG.

By continuing to improve KWorld’s environment, KPMG will be better positioned to

capture, protect, and use its employees’ knowledge to provide customers with the best
global services possible. KPMG executives expect dramatic results from the KWorld
system. According to Reilly, “KWorld is all about increasing our revenues by having
access to solutions and knowledge, increasing our margins through access to
methodologies, and increasing our market share by being a leader.”

Standardizing Design

To build KWorld, KPMG chose Microsoft and Cisco Systems components, which met the
company’s demand for tight integration. The Microsoft Windows NT Server operating
system forms the foundation of KWorld and is designed to work seamlessly with the
Microsoft BackOffice family of server products, which KPMG also uses. Microsoft Site
Server hosts the company’s intranet, Microsoft SQL Server provides relational database
management, and Microsoft Exchange Server delivers messaging and collaboration
capabilities. On the hardware side, KPMG employs the Cisco Systems 7500 router
series and Catalyst Ethernet Switches, which integrate with Microsoft products to provide
reliability and scalability.

In the process of standardizing on Microsoft and Cisco products, KPMG replaced 13

messaging systems and integrated at least seven knowledge-management systems that
were precursors to KWorld. This standardization allows employees to communicate
electronically without worrying about whether their messages arrive safely, as mail
travels through a single system. In addition, a unified messaging system helps KPMG
deliver the right information to the right person at exactly the right time, which often
means the difference between success and failure. The system also simplifies the jobs of
IT administrators by giving them fewer systems to support and maintain, thus lowering
costs.

KPMG plans to deploy KWorld in 30 more countries by 2000, and the company is
already planning for the next generation of KWorld. According to Bob Zeibig, the partner
in charge of KPMG’s Global Knowledge Exchange, the updated version of KWorld will
include enhancements in security, navigation, and personalization. KPMG also plans to
upgrade to the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system to take advantage of Active
Directory, giving administrators greater and more centralized control over content
security and network performance. Cisco Systems will play a major role in that upgrade
process, helping to ensure that the KWorld system can scale up to meet the needs of
more than 100,000 KPMG employees. The strong compatibility between Cisco products
and Windows 2000 will allow KPMG to take full advantage of the newer Microsoft
operating system, providing dynamic network resource allocation to users who are
running bandwidth-intensive applications. “KPMG chose Cisco not only for its proven
track record, but because its products integrate with the Microsoft platform to give us
scalable bandwidth, prioritization of network traffic, and resources,” says Zeibig. “The
Cisco products will be critical to the success of KWorld in the future.”

Product Development
When you think of product development, do you think of software, automobiles, or
electronics? What about snack foods? Consumer goods companies use similar
processes and methodologies to develop the latest chocolate craze as Microsoft uses
them to develop the next great application. In a competitive and volatile snack food
industry, developing products and getting them to market quickly are essential to
success. For industry leader Nabisco, continually developing and producing products
that people want to try is essential to the company’s success, particularly because many
snack foods are impulse purchases. Determining which product ideas to pursue and
which to discard can significantly affect Nabisco’s bottom line. One bad decision can
result in millions of dollars of unprofitable research and development, manufacturing, and
marketing. Nabisco must walk the tightrope between keeping product ideas flowing and
sidestepping expensive failures.

To consistently create profitable products and keep money-losers off the shelves,
Nabisco created Journey, a new product-development process that coordinates all
project communications and establishes firm go/no-go hurdles for every project. Journey
was built in a few months from off-the-shelf Microsoft software products. By enabling
better communication and tighter project management, Journey is saving Nabisco
millions of dollars annually by eliminating unsuccessful development efforts and
expensive product-specific equipment.
From a knowledge worker’s point of view, Journey consists of a series of Outlook forms,
which are organized into categories such as project status, reports, activities, and
supporting documents. When team members click a tab, they see the postings to that
category for a specific project, generally as Office 97 files. For example, a project team
member might write meeting minutes in Microsoft Word and send them to Journey,
which posts the minutes for everyone to see and notifies team members that meeting
minutes are now available. Another might submit project financials as a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet. A third might post a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Journey shows all
team members a summary of this information; if people want more information, they
simply double-click to access the complete file. Figure 3-2 shows how this very typical
organization looks logically.

Because Nabisco is a premier marketing company, it promotes collaboration by putting

powerful analysis tools on the desktops of its marketing staff and other knowledge
workers. “The more tools and technology our knowledge workers have, the better we
communicate, the smarter our decisions, and the faster we can get new products out the
door,” Klein says.
Figure 3-2: Using Outlook forms to organize project information.

Success Rates
Historically, Nabisco’s new products followed a consistent pattern (see Figure 3-3 on the
following page):
The failures that got through the planning process usually did so because project
champions managed to wiggle past guidelines that, if strictly followed, would have
eliminated potential losers before they ever got to market. Nabisco management wanted
a product-development process that left no wiggle room and provided a means for cross-
functional teams to maintain constant communication.

Journey was built on Nabisco’s existing infrastructure, namely Exchange Server and
SQL Server on the back end; the Microsoft Office 97 suite, including the Outlook
messaging and collaboration client, on the desktop; and the Microsoft Visual Basic 5 and
Microsoft Visual C++ development systems. Because Office and Outlook were already in
use, the need for extensive training and education was alleviated. Building Journey on
top of this technology infrastructure saved months, maybe years, of development time
and millions of dollars.

Figure 3-3: Historical product success rates at Nabisco.

 Nabisco Snapshot

Nabisco created Journey to better plan its products, giving them a greater chance of
success straight from the start. The goal was to keep products that don’t meet the
company’s stringent criteria from slipping through the cracks and to foster collaboration
and knowledge sharing during the development process. Journey uses a combination
of the following products:

Operating Systems ƒ Microsoft

Windo
ws
ƒ Microsoft
Windo
ws NT
Workst
ation
ƒ Microsoft
Windo
ws NT
Server
Productivity Applications ƒ Microsoft
Office
97
ƒ Microsoft
Outloo
k
Development Products ƒ Microsoft
Visual
Basic
ƒ Microsoft
Visual
C++
Server Products ƒ Microsoft
BackO
ffice
ƒ Microsoft
Excha
nge
Server
ƒ Microsoft
SQL
Server
ƒ Microsoft
Syste
ms
Manag
ement
Server

Project Repositories

One of the key benefits of Journey is that it acts as a central repository for all project
data, from financial estimates to recent product scores to project timelines. As projects
move along, Journey lets users know which milestones have been passed and which are
coming up. This is typical project-management information.
Journey prescribes that every new product must have market research and financial
tests performed at certain stages. At each stage, minimum scores must be achieved.
This information is communicated through Exchange public folders, so everyone on the
team knows whether a product made the grade or not. Then Journey prescribes the next
step(s) and notifies the responsible parties. Before Journey, these issues could be
skipped or fudged, but the Journey system establishes firm quantitative hurdles and
go/no-go criteria of which everyone is aware.

Journey hides the complexities of the project (and the application itself) from users so
they see only the information they’ve requested at that moment. However, on the back
end, Journey is intelligently calculating scores, dispatching e-mail, updating schedules
and budgets, posting reminder notes, and keeping track of thousands of details for
hundreds of people. The application is written in Visual Basic and Visual C++, and it
builds on standard capabilities in Exchange and Outlook.

Project Reporting

Team members and management can easily produce reports that roll up project data to
create a macro-level view of all the company’s development activities. “Journey gives us
a full portfolio view of new development projects, any time someone wants to see it,”
explains Eileen Murphy, Nabisco’s senior director for new product development.
“Management can very quickly and easily see what we have in the pipeline five years
out. Do we have enough new products coming out in the near term? In the long term?
Do we have a gap between projects that will directly impact revenues two years from
now?” Putting together or updating a rolling 18-month aggregate plan used to be an
enormous task that involved checking with all project teams, tracking down numbers,
and knitting information together manually. Journey does this automatically.

Collaboration

If problems arise during product development, Journey helps the team solve them
quickly, by simultaneously engaging the resources of the whole team, as opposed to the
old method of sequential problem solving. For example, during the development of a
particular cookie product, the manufacturing team reported a problem: The product
developed an undesirable texture during baking tests. The manufacturing team entered
this problem into Journey as a discussion item, and Journey immediately notified the
entire project team. Research and development got involved and offered a solution: add
an ingredient to modify the texture. Another team member reminded everyone that the
addition of an ingredient would require approval by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) and a packaging revision. The packaging department got involved
and made the change. The legal department obtained the FDA approval. In the end, the
problem was solved in a short period of time (a few days) versus the old process that
might have taken weeks or months to play out. This is in sharp contrast to handing the
problem from department to department, none of which has all the information required
to solve it; and eventually, everyone ends up in a series of long meetings that wastes
valuable time.
This scenario isn’t so different from what happens in a software company such as
Microsoft. A test engineer reports a problem, such as a dialog box that displays data
incorrectly, and then other departments collaborate to fix the problem as quickly as
possible. The marketing department chimes in to make sure the development engineers
understand the impact of the problem on customers so they can prioritize it properly.
Product support flags the problem if the department sees it as a serious support
problem. Other departments provide their insight. The company resolves the problem
quickly because of the give-and-take that collaboration makes possible, which is not
much different than the give-and-take that Nabisco’s knowledge-management system
makes possible when its employees troubleshoot their latest cookie product (see Figure
3-4).

Journey is helping Nabisco increase its success rate for product introductions to 100
percent. The company has managed to eliminate the one-third-failure bucket, and the
 staff is working to improve the one third of new products deemed mediocre performers.
“You can really see the change in our new product mix since Journey,” Murphy says.
“We’re making product decisions based more on knowledge and good business than on
emotional attachment to favorite ideas. If things aren’t going well for a new product, we
know it sooner rather than later and can fix or cancel it.”

Managed Costs

Journey makes extensive use of the public folders feature available with Exchange
Server. Individuals can route e-mail messages—along with reports, spreadsheets,
presentations, and other documents—to a public folder that is accessible by any number
of authorized individuals. Everyone on that folder’s list receives an e-mail message
telling them something new has arrived. The public folder feature is useful for keeping
many people abreast of project activities, facilitating collaborative communication, and
providing a coherent trail of communication over long periods of time. A SQL Server
database (currently about 250 megabytes) and a dedicated Exchange server take care
of all the messaging. David Klein, director of marketing technology for Nabisco, says,
“Exchange is a robust environment for developing collaborative applications like Journey.
It has most of the capabilities you need for these kinds of applications, which saved us a
lot of development time.”

Figure 3-4: Problem solving with knowledge management.

Nabisco has made a whole-hearted commitment to 32-bit computing and has launched a
corporate-wide migration to the Windows NT operating system, the BackOffice family of
products, and Office 97 desktop products. Down the road, Windows 2000 and Office
2000 will be available to help the company simplify and centralize its operations.

Nabisco sees huge benefits in standardizing on a single technology infrastructure

throughout the organization. “It takes a while to get there, but when you have a common
infrastructure throughout your organization, you can roll out new applications much
faster, minimize training, and increase users’ productivity,” explains Joseph Farrelly,
Nabisco’s executive vice-president and chief information officer. He says Microsoft
applications are optimized to work together and are fully compatible, reducing costs. In
addition, “The ability to quickly get new applications in users’ hands delivers a very real
business value,” Farrelly says.

By standardizing on both hardware and software and purchasing in volume, Nabisco is

lowering its total cost of PC ownership. All new applications take the Office 97 suite into
consideration, utilizing power and capabilities already developed by Microsoft. Moreover,
because the Windows operating system provides the same interface for all desktop
applications, users can be more productive sooner and training costs are lower. “The
Office 97 products are great products—truly superior to anything else on the market,”
Klein says. “We use features like the Microsoft System Management Server installer to
speed up deployment, which translates directly into lower costs.” He adds that the rich
online help also benefits the bottom line. “The Office Assistant help system lets our users
help themselves more,” reducing helpdesk calls, Klein says.

Support from Microsoft has been crucial to Nabisco’s deployment of both desktop and
server-level products. “We are big users of Premier Support,” Farrelly says. “We’re really
breaking new ground with some of the things we’re doing, and Premier proactively
assists us in our implementation planning stages, while ensuring that any issues are
escalated as needed through the appropriate support channels.”

Nabisco’s standardized client-server infrastructure is allowing the company to rapidly

create applications like Journey that help product designers respond more quickly to
fast-changing customer tastes. After just seven months of use, Journey reduced trial
budgets by a third, which means Nabisco is concentrating on a smaller number of
products that the company believes will be sure things. Nabisco is also saving millions of
dollars by avoiding projects that require huge investments in specialized equipment and
training that can’t be used across other products. Because Journey adds rigor to market
research and other critical decisions, Nabisco is better meeting customer desires,
boosting brand loyalty, and increasing sales. From now on, Nabisco can almost
guarantee it will make money on new products by ensuring they’re baking what
consumers want.

Wrap Up
Product and service design is one of the most obvious uses for knowledge management.
In this usage, development, marketing, sales, legal, and other departments collaborate to
bring better services and products to the market. Ideas that the case studies in this
chapter illustrate include the following:
ƒ Knowledge-management systems that help companies deliver products and
services are usually found in technology companies, the early innovators.
But those kinds of systems are just as appropriate in other types of
companies, such as those that deliver consumer packaged goods.
ƒ Not only can service companies use knowledge-management systems to
develop better services, but they can also use knowledge-management
systems to coordinate, manage, and improve those services once they go
to market.
ƒ Standardizing on a single messaging and collaboration architecture helps
ensure that users will be successful and makes the system more
manageable in the long run.
ƒ Collaboration allows product development companies to bring insight from its
various departments together to produce results quicker than before
possible.
ƒ Implementing a successful knowledge-management system is often no more
difficult than assembling the right set of off-the-shelf products.
ƒ Well-designed knowledge-management systems can reduce product failures
significantly and, as the case with Nabisco, can sometimes reduce them to
zero.

Taking Stock
1. Does your company produce technology products or services?
2. Does your company provide a product or service that requires different
departments to collaborate in order to deliver them?
3. If your company sells a service, do your current systems allow you to
match the right people to the right jobs, accounting for schedules and
skill sets?
4. Does your company have an automated system for forecasting the
success or failure of products and services before sending them to
market?
 5. Do you know your product success rates, and are you happy with
them?

Action Plan
ƒ Evaluate your current systems for product and service collaboration.
ƒ Set realistic goals that you'd like to achieve, such as specific success
rates.
ƒ Working with each department that participates in the product or
service's design, draft requirements for a knowledge-management
system.
ƒ When building your knowledge-management system, leverage
existing products that will help you deliver a system that’s better,
cheaper, and faster.

Chapter 4: Customer Management

Overview
Knowledge-management systems empower companies to build more effective sales
forces and to keep their customers coming back again and again.

No business succeeds without satisfied customers, and the only way for businesses to
satisfy their customers is to build relationships with them. That requires companies to
track customer relationships: their issues, buying patterns, and expectations. Good
knowledge-management systems facilitate this process; for example, they help
companies build a more effective sales force and help companies better support their
customers after the sale.

The primary technologies that facilitate customer management are document tracking
and collaboration. In this chapter, you learn about a variety of solutions from a variety of
businesses that use these technologies.
Microsoft uses the principles you learn about in this chapter to keep better track of the
depth and breadth of its customers. The company also supports its customers—
empowers them is perhaps a better term—using online support. This chapter describes
these systems as well as a few other systems that help businesses build stronger
relationships with their customers. As you read this chapter, keep in mind how these
companies measure the success of their knowledge-management systems. Are the
customers satisfied? Are customers’ needs captured in the company’s products and
services?

Sales Management
Keeping track of companies, customer contacts, and ongoing sales opportunities in a
company as big as Microsoft can be a logistical nightmare. To help manage sales,
Microsoft segments its U.S. sales organization into three main groups (see Figure 4-1):
Figure 4-1: Microsoft sales groups.

A combined telesales and field-sales force handle all three of these customer types. “The
field and phone reps are tied at the hip to serve their customers,” says Patrick Gifford,
director of corporate account sales (CAS). “They have to figure out how to leverage their
own time and our partners’ time to get the most revenue from their accounts.” The
telesales representative is responsible for surveying a large territory and knowing all the
key decision makers in each account: the hardware and software they’re using, the key
Microsoft people involved, the key partners involved, and upcoming opportunities.
They’re calling these accounts all the time, sending intelligence to their selling partners,
and proactively marrying partners into specific opportunities. The field sales
representatives work specific issues that are more difficult to deal with over the phone,
such as highly competitive situations, final contract negotiations, and service issues.

Lost Opportunities

Greg Enell, a Microsoft corporate account sales representative, got the word on a
Tuesday afternoon that a key customer was shopping for a new messaging system but
was already talking to a competitor. The company was a huge Microsoft Exchange sales
opportunity, but Microsoft would have to work fast. Enell called his field representative,
Ramsay Gamble, and put her on alert. He reviewed ATLAS, Microsoft’s corporate
opportunity database, to catch up on the customer’s hardware and software inventory.
He examined numerous spreadsheets that contained account, revenue, and partner
information, and he discovered that his district’s records on the customer were rough and
outdated. They both recalled that the customer had a problem a year before and that
technical support got involved; neither could remember the outcome. Additionally, their
best customer contact was promoted in a recent reorganization. Things were falling apart
for this sales opportunity.

When Microsoft’s two-part sales organization was set up, the company thought that the
ATLAS database would be the primary tool gluing the telesales and field sales forces
together. But ATLAS has neither contact-management features nor offline-replication
capability, which impairs field-sales representatives’ ability to keep their records up to
date. As a result, the two sales organizations had to cobble together a complicated web
of private databases, spreadsheets, and e-mail folders. Each of the 18 field sales offices
had its own way of organizing customer records, and individual telesales and field-sales
reps maintained private records of customer visits, revenue opportunities, and partner
engagements. To do their jobs, the sales force had to scurry to three or four different
places to find data, synthesize it, and make decisions. Hours could be lost tracking down
the right person or piece of information and then combining and reconciling three
Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that didn’t match up. Additionally, frequent requests from
marketing and management for customer lists—by job title, geography, products used,
and so on—for special mailings chewed up a lot of time.
Bringing It Together

Situations like this—working with no timely information—stressed out Enell and Gamble.
Thus, working with a technology specialist, they created a solution: a customer-
management system using Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook. “Outlook
is on everyone’s desk; we knew we needed something to help communication, and we
couldn’t wait for a long application development process,” says Dale Goff, sales manager
in the U.S. CAS organization. “We still have a lot of work to do to make it perfect, but I’m
amazed every day at all the cool things Outlook can do for us.” This knowledge-
management solution has helped the company better manage its customers, and similar
systems can help your business do the same thing.

Each district created an Outlook Contact public folder. Both the field and phone-sales
representatives enter their customer contacts into Outlook or import their data from Excel
spreadsheets and Microsoft Access databases. This becomes the common repository
they use as a shared working database. Every time one of them (or anyone else in the
company, for that matter) has contact with a customer, they enter the encounter into the
Outlook public folder. Everything about that customer—e-mail messages, partner
information, and problem information—is in one central place. No longer do sales
representatives have to look in different places for intelligence about a customer, and the
intelligence that’s in the customer’s public folder is likely more accurate as a result.

Everyone in the company has access to this information over the corporate intranet;
thus, management can pull its own reports on customer activities. If the field manager for
Southern California is asked by his boss, “How many customers are we currently
negotiating with on an enterprise agreement?” he can go to the system and select the
standard “Licensing View” of customer data without contacting each and every sales rep
in his district. Also, when the marketing staff wants to invite all CIOs in a particular region
to a special event, it can pull its own mailing list by selecting a “Job Title” view of the
data, again without imposing on the sales force.

Day to day, the Outlook-based contact management system makes both the telesales
and field sales forces far more productive. “I’m not constantly cycling my brain worrying
about what I’m forgetting, going through mail and my calendar looking for loose ends,”
Enell explains. “I don’t need to do that anymore. I just look in one place. I can view my
outstanding sales opportunities by status, by products used, by partner, by competitor,
by account expiration, or anything else. To pull any of this out of spreadsheets would
take hours.” Enell and his field partner Gamble customized an opportunity-tracking
module within Outlook to help them keep track of sales opportunities by revenue, by
partner, and so on. “When we sit down for our weekly phone meeting, we can now see in
one place what the status of each opportunity is,” Enell says. “Before, the information
was scattered all over. On a weekly basis, we can cover three times the number of
accounts during a two-hour call. I would say this tool is saving us four to six hours a
week.”

Field sales representatives can update information when they’re offline, too. At least
once a day, field sales representatives synchronize their laptop computers to the public
folder using the record-level offline-synchronization feature of Exchange. This keeps the
field folks up to date with all account developments that might have taken place
elsewhere in the company. Because Outlook allows representatives to customize this
offline synchronization, they can synchronize and sort only the accounts they’re
interested in—maybe 500 out of 4000 records. This makes the process faster and more
effective for that representative.

Eating Dog Food

After about a year of use, the Outlook public-folder sales solution has dramatically
improved communication between the field and telesales representatives. “Everyone’s
on the same page all the time,” says corporate account representative Gary Zyznar. “If
you don’t know what’s going on in an account, you haven’t looked in the public folder.”
Zyznar used to keep his own e-mail folders to track account histories. If someone else
was going into the account, he had to take the time to educate him or her first. Now, the
data is there for everyone to see. He says the system has also relieved him of the
onerous chore of backing up data. “We’ve eliminated many representatives maintaining
many separate data centers of information. Today, it’s all backed up in the central data
center, saving us tremendous amounts of time and eliminating the chance that any one
individual will lose or corrupt a critical customer record.”

Zyznar’s telesales partner, Parker Norwood, says he feels the system is saving the reps
hours every week in information fire drills brought on by management’s frequent
requests for mailing lists. “Now management can pull these quickly without disrupting our
work. We no longer have to generate month-end reports, nor see e-mail with these
requests.” Norwood roughly speculates that Outlook is saving 96 reps at least an hour a
day. Plus, the lists are more accurate and up to date, so success rates for direct-mail
pieces and invitations are much higher than in the past.

The Outlook solution has helped Microsoft work more closely with partners.
Representatives can cut a particular view of an account and paste it into an e-mail
message to a partner. It increases the frequency and accuracy of Microsoft’s contact
with partners, making them a closer part of the virtual team.

It’s almost impossible to quantify how much money the system is saving Microsoft or
how much additional revenue it’s bringing in. “But having all the data in one place helps
us make decisions faster,” says Mike Simpson, corporate account representative. “Our
turnaround time is dramatically faster, and management can access this data as fast as
we can. Speed is important in sales, because we often need to move quickly—within
hours—to take advantage of an opportunity. When a competitor makes a play, we need
to be able to deliver a fast, accurate response. We can scan our database and quickly
find other customers we might use as references. The great thing this system
demonstrates to customers is that ‘we’re eating our own dog food,’ as we like to say—
that we’re using our own tools to run our company and doing a great job of it.”

Grassroots Solutions

Microsoft’s Outlook public-folder solution was a grassroots movement. Telesales

representatives created contact-management systems in Outlook and shared them
with their counterparts in the field. Goff thought this was a great idea but saw a need
for consistency in the way these contact-management systems stored customer
information. As a result, CAS set several standards for using Outlook and Exchange.
For example, every district would maintain only one public folder, field representatives
would synchronize with the public folder on a daily basis, and there would be several
standard views of the data, although representatives were allowed to create custom
views based on the standard ones.

To further ensure the success of the project, CAS provided a full day of Outlook
training for all the representatives, particularly training for its contact-management
features, and also appointed a “champion” in each district. The champion was the
person who took the lead in promoting the proper usage of Outlook in that district.

Even though the system is still being polished, it became a functional, productive tool
practically from day one. “We could have taken longer to think through the process and
do more architectural planning up front, but we just jumped in and did the best we
could,” Goff says. “Speed was important; we didn’t have time for a traditional
development process. We opted to dive in and create a rough but usable product right
away. There’s no way could we have done this with other collaboration products. The
average user can’t touch some groupware products to customize them, but they can be
up and running on Outlook in minutes—and manipulating views to their heart’s content.
That kind of hands-on, grassroots, take-charge empowerment is what Outlook is all
about—and our experience is a great example of it.”
Information Loops
Collecting contact information is only half the battle; completing the information loop by
capturing customer feedback is the other half, the Snapper case study, which you
learned about in this book’s introduction, illustrates this part well. Snapper’s first attempt
at getting customer feedback on products back into the research and development cycle
didn’t go smoothly. The company looked to its sales force to provide a direct pipeline
from customers into Snapper and to see where it could operate leaner and meaner.
Snapper decided to eliminate the middlemen, the distributors that served as liaisons
between Snapper and its thousands of dealers around the country. The intention was to
bring Snapper closer to its customers and, of course, eliminate the cut that the dealers
used to take. As a result, in 1997, the company upped its sales force from 10 to 65
people and threw them at thousands of dealers, ranging from mom-and-pop stores to
superstores such as The Home Depot.

The problem was that Snapper’s salespeople drowned in paperwork. Their paper-based
sales and order systems worked fine for 30 customers but not 4500 customers. Sales
representatives lugged heavy catalogs and price books around into dozens of dealer
showrooms; they raced to record orders on paper forms and fax them back to Snapper,
where they were keyed into an IBM AS/400-based manufacturing system. With such a
workload, collaboration among salespeople suffered, too. There was no way a relatively
small sales force could share ideas and customer knowledge using only telephones and
fax machines. Snapper struggled to react to the marketplace and was losing money as a
result. The company failed to get orders to the factory and didn’t get products out of the
factory in time. For that matter, the company got orders wrong and sometimes dropped
orders. To make the situation worse, knowledge about the company’s customers was on
separate systems, and the only way to collaborate was usually to pass diskettes around
or reenter data. Sales people didn’t share best practices, and the company wasn’t
pleased with its customer service.

After a few misfires, Snapper recruited a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider called
Enterprise Communication and Messaging Solutions (ECMS) to help build a knowledge-
management system based on Exchange Server. According to Robert Ginsburg of
ECMS, “Exchange is an extremely powerful messaging system with a very powerful
directory system. It’s also very scalable; you simply add servers and move folders
around. And, very important to any company today, it’s highly cost effective.”
Like many knowledge-management initiatives, the move brought some dramatic
changes to the way Snapper’s sales force operated. Snapper believes this new
knowledge-management solution will give its sales force an accurate, consistent, easy-
to-use tool for taking orders, tracking orders through the factory, and moving product to
dealers precisely when they need them. The company’s knowledge-management system
creates a continuous loop of information between the field and the plant, as illustrated in
Figure 4-2. This ensures that information is accurate as well as timely. According to
Snapper, “We get sales data quickly and react quickly—basically instantaneously.”
Figure 4-2: Information loops.

The company’s knowledge-management system gives its sales representatives a single,

graphical, point-and-click interface for walking customers through a graphical online
product catalog, entering orders, reviewing extensive account information, scheduling
their time, filing expense reports, sending e-mail to customers and colleagues, creating
reports—managing all of the knowledge about customer interactions the sales force
might need as well as carrying out other corporate tasks. Management can use the
system to check up on sales representatives’ progress and schedules to see, for
example, how many cold calls they’re making and how often they’re calling on
customers. Marketing can tap into the system to gather more knowledge about its
customer base, to see what’s selling, and to track how promotions are doing. Also,
manufacturing adapts its production on a daily basis to what’s happening in the field,
driving their business processes off the same, shared customer knowledge base.

Snapper Snapshot

With the help of Enterprise Communication and Messaging Solutions (ECMS), Snapper
built a knowledge-management system that created a continuous loop between the
company and its customers. Better communication between each of the company’s
departments, its customers, and its suppliers means that the company gets the right
products on the shelves at the right time. Snapper’s solution was built on the following
combination of Microsoft products:

Operating Systems ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Server 4

Productivity ƒ Microsoft Office 97
Applications
Server Products ƒ Microsoft BackOffice
ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server

ƒ Microsoft SQL Server

Replacing the Paper

A division of Snyder Communications Inc, Snyder Healthcare Sales is an outsource
sales and marketing agency for healthcare companies. It provides trained sales
representatives who make thousands of on-site calls to doctors’ offices, clinics, and
hospitals on behalf of drug manufacturers, delivering presentations that change
prescribing behavior and drive product sales. It’s a job that demands gathering timely
and accurate information from the drug manufacturers, heeding government regulations,
and remaining as efficient as possible to serve Snyder’s customers and to remain
competitive. Snyder is juggling those responsibilities far more successfully today with a
technology decision that has transformed its business: providing sales reps with
handheld PCs running the Microsoft Windows CE operating system to disseminate and
gather information. The Windows CE-based devices are being used to replace inefficient
paper-based processes, and the results are dramatic. The company began a test in late
1997 and achieved full deployment in the summer of 1998. Snyder now has about 1500
representatives using NEC MobilePro 750 and MobilePro 770 handheld PCs running
Windows CE and a custom pharmaceutical sales-force automation application from IMS
Health Strategic Technologies. The accuracy rate for sales data collected on behalf of its
customers has jumped to 100 percent, up from 85 to 90 percent with the paper-based
process. Moreover, the time it takes Snyder to provide reports to its clients has dropped
to 10 days after a sales call is made. Those reports used to take 60 days or longer.

“The bottom line is that we can provide far better service to our customers, which lets
them make decisions faster and gives us an edge on our competition,” says Tom
Pollock, senior director of information systems at Snyder. “By moving to the Windows
CE-based technology, we’ve eliminated a lot of internal headaches that we had using
paper. We’re making our customers happy, and we’re doing that by being a lot faster and
more accurate with about the same expense as the paper-based system.”

Snyder Healthcare Sales Snapshot

Snyder Healthcare Sales replaced its antiquated paper-based system with a sales-
force automation system that delivers valuable information to its pharmaceutical clients
after sales calls. The change was mandatory in order to win a bid for a large contract
from a leading pharmaceutical company. The long-term benefits of this system include
improved accuracy and quicker data delivery to clients. The company’s knowledge-
management system was built with the following products:

Operating ƒ Microsoft Windows CE

Systems
ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Server

Hardware ƒ NEC MobilePro 750 handheld PCs

Products
ƒ NEC MobilePro 770 handheld PCs

Problems with Paper

Snyder relied for years on paper-based call cards its representatives used during sales
visits to physicians. The call cards were pre-printed sheets containing information such
as physicians’ contact information, products that were discussed with the physician, and
the samples left behind in a physician’s office. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) also requires physician signatures as verification of the type and amount of drug
samples left by the Snyder sales reps.

Call cards were the best method for the times, but they presented Snyder and its
customers with frustrating errors and inefficiencies, Pollock says. “There were multiple
copies of the call cards. One was kept by the sales rep, one by the doctor, another went
to the client pharmaceutical company, while a fourth would go to an outside company
that scanned the information and returned it in an electronic format for us to use for
reporting,” Pollock says, adding that this was common industry practice. “There was a lot
of potential for errors and incomplete forms. Because the rep wrote the information by
hand, the scanning company might have difficulty, for example, discerning a 7 from a 1.”
Snyder maintained staff to check for errors, and those workers would sometimes send
call cards that had missing or incorrect information back to the reps for correction.

By the time that the whole process was finished, it took 60 days or more after the initial
sales call to send the data back to the company’s clients. Snyder’s clients, who relied on
Snyder’s reports to make sales and marketing decisions, lost valuable time as a result.

Handheld Computers

The end of the paper-based sales system began the day Snyder bid for a major contract
from a large pharmaceutical company, a project that promised to keep 400 Snyder sales
reps busy. Snyder got the contract, partly due to its decision to upgrade its processes.
“Because of the size of the client and the focus of the sales force, we needed to come up
with a faster and more accurate way of gathering information,” Pollock says. “We’re in a
competitive business, and to get this contract we had to re-evaluate our processes for
tracking and disseminating information.”

Snyder evaluated what kind of system would fit its needs and the needs of the client,
what the rollout timeframe should be, and whether to build the system itself or buy it. The
company also looked at the form-factor options, beginning with laptops—the obvious
choice at first glance, because Snyder already had some laptops in the field. “We
decided to go with palm-size or handheld type devices rather than laptops,” Pollock says.
“They are a lot cheaper to support than laptops, and they pose less risk while offering
greater conveniences for sales reps. It’s a lot harder to damage the hard drive or to load
unauthorized software. They’re smaller and easier for reps to carry in a briefcase or coat
pocket, they turn on instantly instead of having to boot up, letting the reps work faster
and more efficiently, and they allow for signature-capture capabilities.”

That left Snyder to decide which operating system to use and how to approach the task
of implementing a company standard. The first decision was quickly narrowed to
Windows CE, Pollock says. “We looked at some other systems, including the Palm OS,
but they simply did not have the range of functionality and features that we needed,” he
continues. “The Palm OS form factor was too small for what we were looking for and did
not offer the range of choices in hardware that we found with Windows CE. Windows CE
also offers a lot more features that can be used with sales-force automation applications,
such as the pocket versions of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word.” Windows CE also
made a lot of sense because it would integrate easily with Snyder’s Windows-based
desktops and Windows NT Server-based back-end systems, while offering the same rich
graphical interface and development environment as other Windows products.

Software Solutions

Snyder’s decision to use Windows CE as its mobile operating system was sealed when
the company met with representatives of IMS Health at a Microsoft-sponsored
presentation on mobile computing. IMS Health, a Microsoft solution provider, is a global
leader in pharmaceutical-relationship management. Many of Snyder’s clients used IMS
Health Strategic Technologies’ suite of products for use on laptops as part of an
integrated sales and marketing information system for accessing and generating
information and reports. IMS Health Strategic Technologies, supporting Snyder’s
decision to go with the Windows CE platform, was able to offer a related product called
SteppingStone for Windows CE. The product is customizable so Snyder was able to
build in features that fit its specific business rules.

Evan Sohn, vice president for business development of IMS Health Strategic
Technologies, says the company has issued more than 10,000 user licenses for its
handheld-computing products, which are targeted to pharmaceutical sales-force
automation. Of those products, nearly 40 percent are Windows CE-based, and that
number is growing daily. “As a company focused on delivering strategic products to the
pharmaceutical marketplace, we firmly believe that Windows CE will play a significant
and growing role in helping us deliver strategic technology. The added value that it
brings in terms of more functionality, more form factors, and more memory gives us the
ability to deliver better products,” Sohn says. “Data is the lifeblood of the pharmaceutical
industry, and Windows CE helps us design technology solutions for customers that
deliver not only data, but more importantly insight.”

David Maurer, director of development for IMS Health Strategic Technologies, says that,
from a developer’s perspective, Windows CE is significantly better than alternative
operating systems. “We’ve talked to a lot of developers and hear complaints about the
limitations of the tools available for mobile computing applications,” says Maurer, whose
company uses the Microsoft Visual Studio development system. “From our experience,
Windows CE is leaps and bounds beyond the proprietary environments we’ve worked in
before and the limited tool sets of competing products. The tools are great, the
documentation is great, and the open design environment helps us big time.”

The Total Solution

Snyder’s rollout plans for Windows CE include deploying its NEC MobilePro units to
another 1000 sales representatives in the United States, with the possibility of expanding
to another 1500 sales personnel in Europe.

The sales reps use their Windows CE-based devices for gathering the same kind of
information that was collected on paper, but now the process is much faster and more
efficient. Using a variety of pull-down menus, radio buttons, and other familiar Windows
features, the reps can easily access or enter information on physicians, the types of
drugs they typically prescribe, and samples that are left behind. The devices have a
small but comfortable keyboard for entering notes following a sales call, and they also
contain the call-reporting and signature-capture system designed specifically for the
pharmaceutical business to use on palm-size and handheld PCs running Windows CE.
Features of these systems include the following:

Pollock says one of the great features of the Windows CE-based devices is that the
sales representatives cannot save a file after a call until all the information is recorded,
including a physician’s signature. This eliminates the time and expense involved in the
old paper-based system of tracking down reps and asking them to enter missing
information. It moves the error-correction process, Pollock says, from the back-end of the
paper system to the point of entry.
At the end of each day, the Snyder sales reps log on to the company’s network from the
site of a local Internet service provider, using a secure dial-up connection that is made
from the NEC MobilePro’s modem. Once connected, the handheld PC sends the
information through encrypted FTP and synchronizes the information with the back-end
databases residing on a Windows NT Server-based box at an IMS Service Center. From
there, the information is collated and distributed to the appropriate client pharmaceutical
companies and to Snyder. Snyder is working on replicating the back-end databases to its
headquarters (see Figure 4-3). Snyder plans to use SQL Server to take advantage of
features such as sophisticated data-warehousing functionality, which will let Snyder
provide critical business information to clients even faster and alleviate the need for
paper reporting.
Figure 4-3: Sales force automation.

“This system has already gotten us positive comments from our customers, who now can
get complete, accurate reports from us within 10 days after the initial sales call,” Pollock
says. “This lets them make faster decisions and better forecasts about their products.
Before, they were looking at a 60-day delay in information, and the data would not be
complete.” The Snyder sales representatives using the Windows CE-based devices are
also happy. “We’ve gotten very, very positive comments from the field reps,” he says.
“Our sales people are very aggressive and don’t want to wait for a machine to boot up.
Now with their Windows CE-based devices they simply push the ‘On’ button and they’re
working. There’s no boot time, and they can accomplish a lot while waiting in a reception
area or sitting in their car just before a meeting.”

Pollock says Windows CE technology delivers many more benefits at roughly the same
cost for what was being spent on paper-based processing. The company is now thinking
ahead to future improvements to this solution and additional uses to take advantage of
Windows CE. “We’re looking at using the Windows CE technology in combination with
the Web for gathering information and for internal processes such as updating personnel
files,” he says. “It’s offering us many different options for improving and streamlining our
business processes and tying in with other corporate business operations systems.”

Online Customer Support

Solutions based on handheld computers and Windows CE certainly help manage
customers prior to the sale. However, if the relationship is to continue, customers also
expect service after the sale. A major advantage of the Internet is that it allows more and
more companies to provide that service in the form of online support. Microsoft is leading
this charge with its variety of online support options. The company must provide product
support to millions of customers around the world. But the most demanding users are
technically savvy software developers, consultants, and resellers. Answering the
questions of developers and resellers often identifies key support issues for larger
customer communities.

To provide prompt, accurate technical support for these specialized audiences, Microsoft
recently added a browser-based newsgroup feature to several of its main technical-
information Web sites: Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), serving developers;
Microsoft Direct Access, serving consultants and resellers; and Microsoft TechNet,
serving IT professionals. The sites not only answer technical questions but also feed a
growing knowledge repository that gives faster answers to independent Microsoft
technology providers, Microsoft support professionals, and Microsoft product-
development teams. The online dialogue also fosters a greater sense of community
among users and between Microsoft and its customers. These easily accessible
communities already receive thousands of customer service questions a day. Ultimately,
they also provide Microsoft a way to better understand problems so it can continue to
improve its products.

MSDN Snapshot
 With the help of partner ECMS, Microsoft built a Web-based newsgroup feature for its
developer support sites. The solution enables developers around the world to get help
anytime they need it, often from peers, rather than clogging up the company's support
lines. The company added this feature to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN)
site, which serves developers, to Microsoft Direct Access, which serves consultants
and resellers, and to Microsoft TechNet, which serves IT professionals. The solution
was built on the following products:

Operating Systems ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Server 4

Productivity ƒ Microsoft Internet Explorer 4
Applications
Development ƒ Microsoft Visual Studio 6
Products
Server Products ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5
ƒ Microsoft Internet Information Server

ƒ Active Server Pages

Easy Access to Support

On MSDN Online, the Microsoft Developer Network Web site, developers can find a
broad range of technical information on Microsoft products, from operating systems to
the BackOffice family and Office products. However, until recently, it was basically a one-
way street: Microsoft posted information, and developers read it. Developers who
needed information that wasn't on the MSDN site either had to pay for a support call to
Microsoft or access an independent newsgroup service using a specialized Network
News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) news client. NNTP is a widely accepted protocol for
exchanging news articles, but it's difficult to use and offers no search capabilities.
Microsoft wanted a Web-enabled newsgroup service that would both be accessible to
many more users and also much easier to use.

Microsoft engaged Microsoft Certified Solution Provider ECMS (Enterprise

Communications and Messaging Solutions) of Columbia, South Carolina, to build a Web-
enabled, newsgroup interface to the MSDN and Direct Access Web sites. The solution
uses an HTML user interface running on Exchange 5.5 Public Folders. Individual
communities are stored in unique public folders, which are available through the HTML
interface. Exchange provides a rich search capability as well as the ability to use the
familiar Outlook messaging and collaboration client to manage information. HTML
functionality gives greater access and connection to the knowledge repository. Finally,
because Exchange already provides a set of built-in management, search, and
categorization technologies, the solution was completed in just two months.

Public Discussion Groups

These Web-enabled public folders contain discussion threads on all major Microsoft
products that interest developers, allowing developers to direct their questions or seek
answers easily from the correct thread. The high volume of question-and-answer threads
form a key source of knowledge, not only for the technology providers but also for
Microsoft support professionals, who have to focus their support services and find best-
practice models. The Microsoft support staff now has a new tool for identifying and
monitoring threads of key interest to Microsoft customers and independent technology
providers. Microsoft's support staff can now build on knowledge gained from the
worldwide community of developers who work with Microsoft products to solve technical
problems.
Although the company has hired staff to respond to technical questions around the clock,
the Web-based community solution is a more effective, less expensive support channel
than answering phone calls. Rather than waiting on the phone, users can find fast
answers themselves using the knowledge repository. The newsgroups also allow
Microsoft support professionals to focus their phone time on the more difficult questions
that might not be addressed online. The benefit to developers, obviously, is that they get
answers much faster and more easily. Says Benjamin Walvoord, an ECMS developer
who worked on the project, 'Microsoft and its customers are all learning together, from
one another. It's like giving everyone the answers to the test so everyone does well.'

The newsgroup-fed knowledge tool is also providing valuable input for product
development and improvement at Microsoft. The same product-support team that
handles telephone support now also monitors these newsgroups and forwards product-
improvement ideas to appropriate product teams. With more than 30,000 ideas
generated in the first few weeks, the online discussions are providing Microsoft
developers with plenty of direction.

Knowledge Portal Features

Since the launch of the newsgroup feature on the Direct Access site in late 1998 and the
MSDN Online and TechNet sites in April 1999, tens of thousands of developers have
engaged in question-and-answer discussion threads. In many respects, the Microsoft
support newsgroup works like any other newsgroup: users either search current postings
to see if their questions have already been answered, or they post questions and wait for
either a Microsoft support professional or another developer to respond. Several
features, however, set the Microsoft solution apart from other news services:
ƒ It requires a standard Web browser rather than an NNTP client, making it
much easier to use.
ƒ It offers a search capability, which allows users to zero in on their
questions or answers rather than scrolling through hundreds of entries.

A subscription/personalization service allows users to subscribe to specific subjects and

to be alerted when there are updates to the threads to which they have subscribed.
Subscriptions and alerts add a real-time dimension to the newsgroup service and make it
more responsive and relevant to users with specific interests. This frees people from
having to check periodically for new messages in their interest areas. Finally, the
Microsoft newsgroup is much easier to use and navigate than standard newsgroups
because of its familiar Outlook and Web-browser interface.

The MSDN/Direct Access technical communities are the first fully functional Web-
enabled newsgroups to run on Exchange Server. The ability of Exchange to run
newsgroups, provide subscription, file attachments, and file searching functionality in a
Web-based package creates an unparalleled knowledge resource. Because users tap
into the newsgroup using a browser instead of a traditional NNTP newsreader, they
circumvent proxy-server and firewall restrictions. Because permissions for individual
users can be applied to individual public folders on Exchange servers, multiple
newsgroup implementations can be deployed on the same hardware infrastructure.

Looking ahead, Microsoft and ECMS are working on tools to maintain and improve the
quality of the knowledge base by enhancing the automatic indexing process and finding
ways to measure quality other than by document age alone.

Correspondence Management
Connect Austria markets wireless communications under the brand name ONE. With so
much information available on an ongoing basis, ONE wanted to guard against
overwhelming its employees with data. To head off information overload, IT managers
customized the company's knowledge-management system by setting up Exchange
Public Folders for groups that share responsibilities and interests. Public folders provide
authorized users with a common repository for e-mail, threaded discussions, contact
information, and calendars. 'With Exchange, you can filter to provide users with the
information they need, not just with large quantities of information,' Peter Filka, IT
Codirector for Connect Austria, says.

The customer-service call center is an example of how ONE uses public folders in its
daily operations. When call-center employees received questions via e-mail, they would
print them and deliver them to someone who could answer the question. Then that
person would key the answer and send it back to the customer. To streamline this
process, ONE created a correspondence-management tool that takes advantage of the
company's collective knowledge and experience. Now, Outlook categorizes each
question based on the presence of keywords in the e-mail and routes the message to a
designated Exchange Public Folder. Then a customer-service representative responds
to the question, often with a prewritten answer. This has improved response times and
freed customer-service representatives to perform other tasks. In addition, ONE
managers can now track and analyze these e-mail messages, tailoring their services to
meet customers' needs better.

Such responsiveness wouldn't have been possible before. With knowledge-management

tools such as this correspondence-management application, ONE can transform raw
information—such as customer questions—into shared knowledge that helps the
company become more responsive. And the longer the system is in place, the more
integral that kind of performance will be to day-to-day operations. Says Filka, 'The
importance of our knowledge-management system will grow day by day because the
amount of information we collect grows day by day.'

Connect Austria ONE Snapshot

Connect Austria needed to provide its employees with an easy method to share
information. The result is a knowledge-management solution that improves
communication, facilitates knowledge sharing, and reduces sharing time. Products that
Connect Austria used in its solution include the following:

Operating ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Server

Systems
ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Workstation

Productivity ƒ Microsoft Office

Applications
Internet Tools ƒ Microsoft Internet Explorer
Server ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server
Products
ƒ Microsoft SNA Server

ƒ Microsoft SQL Server

ƒ EARIS Document Library

Wrap Up
Knowledge management helps companies better manage and support their customers.
The case studies in this chapter illustrated the following points about knowledge
management:
 ƒ Contact management is an important part of a knowledge-manage- ment
system. It helps ensure that companies are working with timely, accurate
intelligence about each of its customers.
ƒ Microsoft uses knowledge-management systems based on Outlook and
Exchange to support its sales representatives as well as its customers.
ƒ Knowledge management is more than sales-force automation. An effective
knowledge-management system also completes the infor- mation loops by
returning customer feedback to sales, marketing, and manufacturing.
ƒ Knowledge-management systems that use handheld devices to replace paper
remove error and delays from sales and data-collection processes.
ƒ The case studies in this chapter illustrated how quickly and easily most
businesses can build knowledge-management systems using Outlook and
Exchange.

Taking Stock
1. Does your sales force have the information it needs in order to be
successful? Is that information accurate and current?
2. Is your company still using paper-based sales processes?
3. Does your company have a mechanism to return customer feedback
to your sales, marketing, and manufacturing departments? How well
does it work?
4. Does your company frequently drop orders or ship orders late?
5. Are your manufacturing and marketing departments working with
accurate sales numbers in order to produce an appropriate amount of
product?.
6. Do you support your customers online?
7. When customers correspond with your company, is that
correspondence tracked?

Action Plan
ƒ Implement a knowledge-management system that helps your sales
force work with more timely and accurate information
ƒ Make intelligence from the sales department available to other
departments, such as marketing and manufacturing.
ƒ Build an online knowledge base to support your company's customers
ƒ Implement tracking systems that help ensure customers are pleased
with the results of any correspondence they have with your
company.

Chapter 5: Employee Management

Overview
Think of knowledge management as customer service for your employees, helping them
become happier, smarter, and more productive in their roles.

Few companies can say that their employees are not their most valuable assets;
knowledge management can help every company take better care of its employees. With
an effective knowledge-management solution, companies can better motivate their
employees, better reward them, and align their skills with corporate needs.

Effective knowledge-management solutions deliver training, track employees’ skills and

competencies, remove barriers to productivity, provide current company information,
manage benefits, help supervisors staff their departments, and simplify expense
reimbursement. Dynamic market conditions can catch companies without valuable skill
sets across its employees, for example. Knowledge-management systems can identify
skill gaps as well as provide mechanisms for closing those gaps. Identifying employees
that significantly outperform their peers is useful for finding best practices that companies
can share with other employees.
Employee management is thus an ideal area for companies to improve with knowledge-
management solutions. This chapter describes how some companies, including
Microsoft, address the issues you’ve just read about.

Training
Training is an obvious target for knowledge management. Connect Austria is a prime
example of a company that relies on its system for orienting the employees it hires.
Training 50 to 100 new hires a month quickly and keeping veteran employees up to date
on new policies and procedures remains a top priority for managers at this company.
Thanks to the company’s knowledge-management system, new employees can ramp up
more quickly than before. According to Peter Filka, IT Codirector for Connect Austria, the
average person takes less than half an hour to learn how to use the system.

For training and company information, new and veteran employees find the corporate
intranet a valuable part of the knowledge-management system. Connect Austria
publishes its handbooks, manuals, and other administrative information on its intranet.
While knowledge-management systems won’t replace existing training materials, they do
make those training materials more available to users. Using the system’s search tool,
employees can find information they need quickly. Whenever managers approve a
change, they notify employees by e-mail. By publishing this kind of information to its
intranet, the company saves both the time and the fixed costs associated with frequently
printing and distributing thousands of memos and handbooks.

Skill Alignment
Training to keep employees’ skills current is only half the story, though; effective
solutions also help companies align employees’ skills with the companies’ needs. For
example, Siemens’ 400,000 employees make it the fourth largest company in the world
and a leader in highly complex SAP R/3 implementation. Siemens Business Services
division has 1600 SAP R/3 consultants working around the globe to provide customers
with solutions to complex business and technical problems. For Siemens, the key to
managing such a geographically dispersed workforce was to create Consultant Network.
Consultant Network includes a resource-planning tool that helps Siemens track its
experts and assign them to projects worldwide. Illustrated in Figure 5-1, this tool gives
the company an easy way to profile consultants, identify expert skills, and look up
availability so that it can assign the right person to the right job at the right time. “In the
consulting business, changes can happen very quickly,” says Martin Luckfiel, KM
Solution Manager for Siemens. “A project may be delayed unexpectedly, causing us to
shift our resources. A customer in London is expecting a consultant with certain skills to
show up next week, while the assigned consultant has been delayed in Malaysia for two
weeks. Using our resource planning tool, we can zero in on all consultants who have the
right qualifications and availability to get the job done.”
Figure 5-1: Consultant Network.

Consultant Network enables Siemens’ consultants to find answers and best practices
faster than they could previously. “Customers expect fast, professional responses,”
Luckfiel says. “This knowledge base gives us the ultimate competitive advantage by
enabling us to provide that fast, accurate response. A customer knows they can’t get our
five best people assigned to their project; but this system lets us leverage all our best
consultants for every assignment. The sharing of expertise lets our junior consultants be
almost as smart and productive as our senior consultants. Customers really appreciate
this.”

Siemens’ knowledge-management system has enough flexibility and scalability to meet

the company’s continually growing business needs and to stay a step ahead of the
competition. According to Luckfiel, “The knowledge-management solution has had quite
an impact on our company, and people see this system as a real aid to their daily work.
The technology makes people eager to collaborate, and its accessibility allows everyone
to stay up to date on every customer. The Consultant Network has truly become our
digital nervous system. It’s the backbone of our business, giving us a major competitive
advantage.”

Benefits
Microsoft is leading the knowledge-management charge. In my conversations with the
company’s employees, they always rave about how easy it is to work with human
resources through its knowledge-management portals. They also tell me how little paper
they have to use to process forms such as vacation requests. Before delving into that,
however, a bit of background is appropriate. Microsoft is well known for hiring smart,
highly productive people who are focused on developing top-quality products, programs,
and services. To help keep employees enthusiastic and dedicated, the company offers a
variety of benefits, including stock options, a stock-purchasing program, comprehensive
health insurance, and a 401(k) program.

In the past decade, Microsoft has grown from fewer than 10,000 employees to more than
20,000. This rapid growth contributed to a complex benefits package, which increased
the number of paper and e-mail forms employees were required to use to enroll for and
manage their benefits. Additionally, all human-resources materials—including benefits
information, enrollment forms, and time cards—were scattered throughout the
company’s servers and buildings. This lack of centralized information made it difficult for
employees to find what they needed quickly and distracted them from their work.
Employees needed an easy way to access this information, to personalize and update
their records, and to check the status of their benefits. To solve this problem, the Human
Resources (HR) department faced the challenge of developing an intranet site that
offered one-stop shopping for all its information and processes. “Our goal with an HR
intranet is to provide excellent customer service to Microsoft employees, so that they can
focus on getting their jobs done,” says Kimberly Mecham, product manager for HR
Operations. “They need easy access to information, and they need to be able to get that
information from anywhere at any time.”

In October 1995, Microsoft’s HR group introduced HR Web, an intranet site that serves
as the foundation for a growing number of specialized applications. These applications
include information about and enrollment for stock options, employee stock purchase
discounts, a 401(k) plan, and absence reporting. Additionally, the site hosts a wide
variety of employee-related publications, including the employee handbook, a weekly
newsletter, and campus maps. Employees also enjoy visiting one site to learn about
commuting options, vacation travel packages, tuition assistance, and community-
volunteer opportunities.

HR Web is available seven days a week, 24 hours a day so that employees can access
information and forms from any location—at home, while traveling, or at work—when
they need it. This flexibility frees them up from having to come to the office to retrieve
paper forms. The environment is personalized and secure so that an employee can
check how many stock options she’s vested, how many vacation days she’s used, and if
her medical insurance will cover a particular ailment—all in less than five minutes. The
employee data in the site—including name, social security number, manager, hire date,
and employment status—flows from Microsoft’s SAP HR module, eliminating the need
for someone to enter the data more than once. This process also ensures that the data is
current.

Since its inception, HR Web has saved Microsoft more than $1 million a year, and it has
eliminated more than 200 paper forms. More than 21,000 users access the site each
month, which has helped eliminate the need to retain nine people just for answering e-
mail and phone requests. The company is saving 75 to 90 percent in postage and
material costs. The following sections tell you more about how Microsoft realized these
terrific gains.

Paperless Management

HR Web simplifies the process for reporting vacation time, sick time, and, for hourly
employees, work time with a time-card/absence-reporting application. This application
can determine if an employee is hourly or salaried and direct him to time cards or
absence-reporting forms accordingly. It can also calculate how many vacation hours an
employee has left, based on how many he has already used. It replaces a paper-based
time-card system and an e-mail-based absence-reporting system, decreasing processing
time by half.

Payroll and Direct Deposit

The payroll area of HR Web includes an online direct-deposit feature that

enables employees to specify how they want to allocate their paychecks to a selected
bank, investment accounts, and personal benefits. Additionally, HR Web posts earnings
statements for each employee to view in a secure environment. This has eliminated the
need to print and mail paychecks or paystubs, saving the company $600,000 a year.

Stock Purchase Programs

Microsoft’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) enables employees to buy Microsoft
stock at a discount. Prior to HR Web’s ESPP application, HR sent a record of individual
stock purchases to each participating employee who requested one. These records,
which include the total number of shares an employee has purchased along with the
purchase price, had to be downloaded from the company’s source system, printed, and
distributed. In addition, HR sent a memo to notify employees of their purchases after
each six-month purchase period.
Now, using HR Web’s ESPP intranet application, each employee can access a view-only
page that provides a record of her stock-purchase history. Employees can also use the
ESPP application to enroll in or withdraw from the program, receiving a full refund on
their contributions at any time. In addition to providing these services, the ESPP
application houses a real-time Microsoft stock ticker, Microsoft’s stock-split history, and
information that helps employees navigate tax-related issues. By channeling the
employee stock-purchase program onto the intranet, HR has eliminated paper and e-
mail enrollment forms, reducing administrative costs dramatically. Materials and postage
expenses have dropped 75 percent, and e-mail volume resulting from employee
questions has decreased 25 percent.

Like the ESPP application, the stock-option application provides an individual account of
each employee’s stock-option history. It indicates how many options an employee has
been granted, how many options that employee has vested, how many he has
exercised, and how many are left to exercise. HR uses this application to distribute
stock-option grants upon hire or after a review period and to confirm when an employee
exercises options. Before this tool was available, a stock administrator spent more than
four hours each day sending individual e-mail summaries to employees who requested
the information. Now it takes an administrator no more than an hour a day to answer
stock-related questions. HR also eliminated the need to hire three temporary employees
during each review period to distribute grant packages. Now packets are ready for
distribution in only eight hours, versus three weeks, and only one full-time employee is
involved in the process. Finally, HR has reduced the time required to distribute exercise
confirmations (from 15 hours to five hours a week), and the department no longer needs
to store paper records of employee stock transactions because the records are all online.

401(k) Administration

Microsoft offers all salaried employees a 401(k) plan and matches their contributions up
to a certain amount. The plan is administered by an investment firm, which manages a
variety of top-rated mutual funds, as well as other investment vehicles, from which
employees can choose to invest their money. With HR Web’s 401(k) application,
employees can enroll in the plan, choose investment options, and change the
percentage of eligible compensation they want to contribute to the plan. The application
provides detailed information on different funds and a link to the investment firm’s home
page, where employees can reallocate their contributions. After an employee signs up
for the 401(k) plan, the application automatically notifies the investment firm and the
Microsoft payroll department, eradicating the need for human intervention.

Staffing
Small organizations can be nimble. They are often quick to reorganize and reconfigure in
response to escalating competition, demanding customers, and changes in market
conditions. Because of these abilities, they are frequently well positioned to take
advantage of new and emerging market opportunities. If they change effectively, they are
more likely to prosper and grow larger to build on their successes. But there lies one of
the major challenges to all successful companies: a larger organization is rarely as
nimble as it was in its early days, yet its need to respond promptly to changes and
opportunities remains unchanged.

This was the challenge the Microsoft HR department faced. The company’s success had
resulted in an explosive growth in personnel, as noted earlier. However, this rapid growth
made it significantly more difficult to manage staffing issues throughout the company.
Each of the company’s business units had its own system for tracking and managing
headcount. When managers changed their teams, they initiated a paper-based
transaction to update the corporate records. Managers would submit updates to HR
personnel, who maintained 18 databases located worldwide. Twice a week, these 18
databases were consolidated into one reporting database. By the time the information
was consolidated, it was at least four days behind reality.
Such a complex set of systems and processes did not lend itself well to rapidly
transferring information, which is what managers needed to do to make effective staffing
decisions. The information in the central reporting database was useful to corporate HR
and Finance for quarterly and annual closing information; however, it was of virtually no
use to the business-unit managers because they had no way to access it. That
compromised the abilities of managers to change their organizations quickly in response
to rising business challenges.

Tracking Headcount

To solve these problems, Microsoft installed SAP R/3’s HR module to consolidate the 18
HR databases and developed an intranet-based application called HeadTrax. HeadTrax
provides Microsoft employees throughout the world with Web access to headcount
information for the entire organization. Both SAP and Microsoft’s domestic recruiting
database download data into the HeadTrax database every night, ensuring that the
information in HeadTrax is current.

HeadTrax is particularly useful to managers who need to view and change their
organizations rapidly. Managers can view employees by cost center or by their positions
in the organizational hierarchy. HeadTrax also enables managers to look at headcount
information in different timeframes for planning purposes. They can view data from the
preceding business day, data that is effective as of the end of the fiscal month, or all
open positions before the end of the fiscal year. HeadTrax also lets managers query
organizational data—for example, finding all employees with a specific job title attached
to a specific organization. This feature provides them with a wealth of accurate, up-to-
date information that was difficult, if not impossible, to get by using the previous system.

HeadTrax not only makes it easy for managers to draw current information from a global
database, but it also provides managers and other employees with an easy-to-use,
paperless system for entering and updating information. HeadTrax enables managers
(and administrative assistants working on their behalf) to view and update data, making it
simple for an assistant to process an employee transfer or initiate a request for a
contingent staff position. In addition to increasing data accuracy and detail, HeadTrax
increases the finance department’s visibility into the details that drive its headcount
reports. HeadTrax reduces the workload for HR administrators because headcount
information entered on the intranet is automatically uploaded into Microsoft’s SAP HR
module within one day. This represents a 300-plus percent improvement from when it
took three or more days to manually reenter the information into SAP. Moreover,
because the data is entered on the intranet and automatically sent to SAP, it is subject to
significantly fewer of the typing errors that plagued the paper-based system. To ensure
accountability, HeadTrax provides a complete audit trail for every transaction.

Managing Headcount

With more than 20,000 employees worldwide, HeadTrax has dramatically changed how
Microsoft manages headcount. Those changes enable managers to respond more
quickly to opportunities in the marketplace. HeadTrax processes approximately 24,000
employee transactions per month, which is a boon to the growing organization. Prior to
HeadTrax, the task of collecting and processing headcount-change data was so time
intensive that only 10,000 transactions per year could be completed. This represents a
significant improvement in the throughput of information for such a rapidly growing
company.

For Microsoft, HeadTrax ensures the easy access to accurate information about their
organizations that managers need. It is decreasing the costs and increasing the
efficiency of Microsoft’s HR and Finance departments, which own the person and
position information, respectively. These departments have replaced the 18 HR
databases and all the business-unit systems with one effective application that works for
everybody. HeadTrax improves data integrity throughout the company by providing a
single repository for global headcount information. Future versions of HeadTrax will do
even more. They will enable designated users to initiate recruitment for an employee
position, to create and post job descriptions on Microsoft’s intranet and on the Web, and
to model their organizations in different ways without having to save each version in the
SAP HR module.

This ability to reshape the organization quickly to respond to new opportunities and new
market conditions is a requirement in today’s fast-paced business world. HeadTrax helps
ensure that Microsoft is nimble enough to spring when opportunities present themselves.

Performance Reviews
Technology will never replace a personal, face-to-face performance review, but
knowledge management can make establishing and recording the review information
more efficient. At Microsoft, some 3,000 managers conduct performance reviews for
more than 20,000 eligible employees. The process of evaluating, updating, and
managing review information has been enhanced by a desktop application used around
the world: MS Review.

Managers and employees discuss performance plans and goals year-round in an

ongoing process that encourages frequent communication and feedback. Twice a year,
most employees participate in a comprehensive performance review. The Microsoft
process for reviewing performance provides a structured method for managers and
employees to set goals, review achievements, and develop an action plan for
professional development. During the biannual performance-review periods, managers
assign numerical performance ratings for each employee and might adjust employee
compensation as a result. To help administer the biannual performance reviews,
Microsoft managers rely on MS Review to see what review scores employees earned in
previous periods and to enter information for the current period. They can also use MS
Review to see whether the review decisions they made fall within corporate guidelines.
For mid-level and senior managers, this information is particularly useful; it shows them
the aggregate amounts determined by all managers within their organization and allows
them to compare their numbers against their overall compensation budgets. If a
particular business unit exceeds its budget, the senior manager can push the review set
back to the responsible managers for reconsideration.

'MS Review isn't a tool to help managers write performance reviews,' says Debbie
Hickox, the product manager for MS Review. 'All Microsoft employees and managers
use a Microsoft Word template to prepare a summary document. Once the reviews are
written, managers use MS Review to add employee review details, including a numerical
performance rating, and consolidate information on employees in their organization. MS
Review enables managers to analyze statistics, view budgets, and track their numbers
against corporate or subsidiary budgets. It's a kind of one-stop shopping experience—
providing managers with a single place where they can enter and view review details and
compensation information.'

Out with the Old

Prior to MS Review, the task of collecting and managing the data required for the review
process was labor intensive and time consuming. Microsoft's HR group used to rely on
Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to gather review information from managers. The
spreadsheets grew more sophisticated, but the method for gathering and processing
review information remained constant. Managers had to send the spreadsheets back to
Microsoft HR, where the information would be consolidated by hand from the multitude of
files. HR would roll up information for individual groups into larger group statistics, and it
would then roll that information into still larger organizational information. The aggregate
information could then be sent to Microsoft senior managers, who could see whether the
amounts fit within the budget.

The problems associated with this method were apparent. To begin with, Microsoft did
not have a centralized HR information system. Microsoft's domestic operations were
handled by an HR department based in Redmond, while each subsidiary operated its
own HR department and system. No system consolidated data across the entire
company. HR managers could manually consolidate information from each group and
subsidiary to create a corporate-wide picture; however, it was difficult to ensure that the
overall view was accurate due to the possibility of human error from any point of data
entry.

Moreover, managing so many files required a great deal of time. From the day HR began
to develop and distribute the spreadsheet templates to the day the final information was
entered into the HR systems was a full six months—and then it was time to begin the
process all over again.

In with the New

Today, the review process takes about two months. Company-wide reviews still take
place twice each year, but a variety of changes at Microsoft have streamlined the
process considerably. Microsoft now uses the HR module of SAP R/3 to manage
employee records for all its operations, domestic and international. Prior to each of the
review periods, Microsoft HR extracts employee performance information from the SAP
database and creates a data mart running on Microsoft SQL Server. This information
serves as the core database for the review process.

Microsoft HR managers then send an e-mail message to managers of the other

departments. Not only does the message remind them that it is time to do performance
reviews, but it also provides a link that enables the manager to install the latest version
of MS Review. When the manager logs onto the intranet and launches the application,
MS Review encrypts and downloads the corresponding employee information to the
manager's system. The data is then stored securely on the manager's workstation while
the review period is underway.

When the time comes to make compensation decisions, managers can use MS Review
to see the employee's past compensation and review ratings. They can then compare
that information to other employees in the group. MS Review informs a manager
precisely where an employee's salary falls relative to the recommended salary range for
his position. It provides current information on performance-review ratings and an
account of the number of employees who have received certain performance ratings. It
even provides budget information for different compensation elements, for example,
salary increases and bonuses. As the manager makes review recommendations, she
enters that information into MS Review. As soon as that information has been entered
and accepted in MS Review, the application transfers that information from the
manager's desktop to the HR database. When an individual manager has completed her
reviews, the manger then approves the entire review package by clicking a button in MS
Review. At that time, MS Review notifies that manager's manager by e-mail that a set of
reviews is complete and ready for examination.

Executives at the top of each organization determine how far down the management
chain the MS Review tool is pushed, and they can designate certain access levels for
individual managers in the hierarchy. Senior managers can use MS Review to record the
information for their direct reports; they can also use MS Review's tools for real-time
analysis to see how the performance review scores and compensation budgets are
being distributed. 'I really like the MS Review tool. I used the Excel spreadsheet review
models previously, and this is a vast improvement,' says Sabina Nawaz, a group
program manager in HR Management and Leadership Development. 'The statistical
reporting lets me track employee to employee how I'm doing against my budget and
other review guidelines. There are great ways to sort the data as well as see employee
detail and history. MS Review is a tool that makes my job a lot easier.'

After a manager has approved the review recommendations for her organization, the
recommendations are passed up the managerial chain for further approvals. Mid-level
and senior managers can view and modify recommendations for individual scores. If a
senior manager discovers that one of his direct reports has exceeded a budget, for
instance, he can send the entire set of recommendations back to that report for
reconsideration. Ultimately, all the data for each group is approved by the department's
top-level managers. From there, it is passed from the MS Review database to SAP R/3,
where the information is linked to the employee record in the HR module. Three months
later, HR personnel download all employee records to the data mart again, as the review
process begins anew.

For Microsoft, MS Review is a streamlined solution that maximizes the efficiency with
which managers can record their evaluations of employee performance. It provides
managers throughout the organization with timely, accurate information and enables the
company to manage its budgets with a higher level of effectiveness. It has cut in half the
amount of time HR personnel must spend preparing materials for each review period.
This frees them up to work more closely with organizational managers on other aspects
of employee management. MS Review provides better information for better decisions,
and that enables Microsoft managers to run their organizations more effectively.

Expense Management
Microsoft has subsidiaries in more than 60 countries around the world. Because it has a
strong worldwide presence, employees spend nearly $200 million a year traveling on
business. Additionally, they often spend out-of-pocket money on work-related expenses
such as meals, supplies, and entertainment. Because Microsoft is a fast-paced, dynamic
work environment where employees manage a large workload, people don't want to
spend a lot of time filling out expense reports. If they find time, they want to be able to
submit expense-reimbursement reports easily and to be reimbursed promptly.

This was not possible with the previous system, which was based on paper forms. When
employees filled out expense reports, they often did so at work because the forms were
located in the office. An alternative was to complete one of many templates based on
Excel. The employee then printed the reports, attached the receipts, and submitted the
package to her manager, who often took longer than a week to approve it and send it on
to Accounts Payable. After the form was approved, Accounts Payable would enter the
information manually from the paper form into the financial system, which would issue
the check. On average, this procedure could take up to three weeks, often putting
employees behind on paying their bills for corporate credit cards. 'Employees wanted to
be reimbursed faster,' explains Clayton Fleming, director at CPG Process Design. 'Our
challenge was to figure out how to repay them in a timely fashion without hiring more
people in Accounts Payable.'

Another problem was that department-specific versions of the expense-report template

had been created throughout the company. At one point, 136 expense-report templates
resided on various servers. The multiplicity of forms slowed processing in Accounts
Payable because form processors had to standardize data from different formats. Also,
outdated forms often had old account codes, obsolete mileage rates, or incorrect or
missing classifications, such as airfare and entertainment expenses. These issues posed
a problem for the Corporate Procurement Group (CPG), which oversees Accounts
Payable.
To solve these problems, CPG developed MS Expense, an expense-reporting
application that links directly with Microsoft's SAP R/3 financial module. After an
employee fills out and submits an expense report over the intranet, it's automatically
parked, pending management approval, in the SAP module without any manual
uploading or dual entry. The employee's manager automatically receives an e-mail
message that the report is ready for review. If the manager approves the expense report,
the report's status changes to Posted in the SAP module. At this point, the report is
ready for payment, which the SAP module does. Because all these steps directly create
and update transactions in SAP, no manual processing is required. The automated
procedure thus cuts costs, shortens the payment cycle, and eliminates data-entry errors.

An average of 15,000 Microsoft employees use MS Expense in 29 countries to process

2600 Microsoft expense reports each week. MS Expense has greatly improved
Microsoft's expense-reporting function, saving the company significant sums of money
and hours of work while eliminating errors that occur when processing paper forms. It
saves Microsoft approximately $400,000 a year in personnel costs alone, because CPG
was able to re-deploy half of its expense-reporting group to other positions. Only four
people manage the expense reporting and audit processes, and CPG expects that
number to diminish even further. MS Expense has also improved employee satisfaction
with the expense-reimbursement process. Employees get paid in three days, not three
weeks, and they can report expenses at any time from anywhere in the world.

Wrap Up
Knowledge management can help companies save significant sums of money by
enabling them to improve employee management. Key areas in which knowledge
management is most effective for this include the following:
ƒ Training helps keep employees sharp. It can take many forms, including
multimedia, online handbooks and manuals, and so on.
ƒ Skill alignment ensures that the right people are working on the right
projects at the right time. Knowledge management enables companies to
find experts that are available for a par-ticular job.
ƒ Benefits management is a natural target for any knowledge-management
system. Companies can simplify paper-based systems, reduce HR costs,
provide corporate information to employees, and more.
ƒ Bigger companies can benefit most from better staffing management.
Using knowledge management, those companies can keep track of
headcount and reorganize more quickly.
ƒ Performance reviews, as demonstrated by MS Review, are more efficient
when moved from manual processes to knowledge-management
systems. As a result, reviews are completed on time, and supervisors can
better manage their budgeting processes.
ƒ Expense reimbursement is best done on an intranet. Companies can
significantly reduce the cost and turn-around time for reimbursing
employees for out-of-pocket expenses, improving morale and productivity.

Taking Stock
1. Are your HR processes automated as much as they could be?
2. Do your employees grumble about your HR processes?
3. Do your employees receive the training required to perform their jobs
the way you’d like?
4. Do your employees have available training for the skills that might be
required as the business climate and other pressures change?
5. Do you know who the experts are in your organization? Can managers
in your company quickly identify the right people to assign to a
particular project and determine their availability?
6. Does your organization use paper-based forms for vacation requests,
benefit-enrollment forms, and other HR information?
7. Can your employees view relevant HR information about themselves
on your intranet?
8. Would your company be able to reorganize or move staff around
quickly?
9. Do you view your performance review process positively or
negatively?
10. Do you submit expenses using paper-based forms? How long does it
take for employees to get expense checks after submitting forms?

Action Plan
ƒ Identify the various sources of HR data that exist in your organization.
ƒ Identify the key HR processes that would benefit most from online
automation.
 ƒ Walk the halls and talk to employees to get a better feel for the types
of problems a knowledge-management system might solve, as well
as opportunities it might seize.

Chapter 6: Business Planning

Overview
Enable your company’s knowledge workers to make better decisions by providing them
with more complete information on which to act.

Constantly changing business climates challenge businesses to revise their strategies

within every area of the company. Strategies change from supply rooms to executive
suites. As a result, companies are embracing the idea that they must share information
across all levels and empower knowledge workers with decision-making authority.
Knowledge management supports this idea by enabling systematic access to the
business data, the competitive information, and the market demographics that support
decision-making processes.
All the case studies you read about in this chapter have certain things in common. By
providing better access to business data and information, the knowledge-management
systems of the companies profiled help employees discover trends, reduce response
times, and improve competitive awareness. In short, the systems help knowledge
workers in those organizations act on more complete information. Technologies that
enable these results include the analysis and collaboration tools you learn about in
Chapter 8, “Exchange Web Storage System.”

Decision Making
California Pizza Kitchen's (CPK) information systems used to run on more platforms than
there were people in the IT organization. The company also had a variety of
disconnected systems within its headquarters and stores. Getting timely ad hoc reports
to executives, analysts, and store managers was virtually impossible because data was
locked in different operational systems at different sites. CPK managers and executives,
for example, wanted to know how the company was performing—which restaurants were
doing well, which ones weren't, and what the company's financial picture was on a daily,
even hourly, basis. The company's AS/400 held all the financial accounting records and
captured daily sales data from each of the 70 stores. However, the data was captured
nightly on a whole-day basis, leaving management in the dark about what was
happening in restaurants at different times of the day or with different menu items. What
item was selling best at lunch versus dinner? Who ordered it? How were customers
paying for their meals? Analysts were expending 'horrendous efforts,' says Kevin Moon,
director of information services at CPK, to wrestle data from one system into another for
analysis. 'We had lots of good data but no information. We decided to develop a data
warehouse to centralize and simplify our access to business information.'

CPK built its data warehouse by using Microsoft SQL Server. Hummingbird BI/Query, an
enterprise-strength query and reporting tool, provides access to the data. BI/Query is
part of the Hummingbird BI/Suite, a fully integrated, scalable enterprise business-
intelligence solution that allows users to access and analyze information both on the
desktop and over the Web. CPK chose BI/Query because of its ease of use. 'BI/Query
beat all the other business intelligence tools we looked at,' Moon says. 'In 15 minutes,
users can get a handle on its basic functionality and be on their way. From there, it's
easy for them to work among themselves and train one another.'
CPK's data warehouse contains sales data, food-cost data, labor data, and marketing
information. All of it is more granular. CPK managers and analysts use it to monitor
virtually every aspect of the company's business (see Figure 6-1). For instance, analysts
receive daily data from each restaurant and use BI/Query to discover which food and
beverage items are selling and which ones aren't. The analysts can access incredibly
detailed transactional information, such as which items sold in which service areas of a
restaurant (dining room, delivery, or takeout), customer-check information (size of bill,
 size of party), and how many customers paid for their meals using credit cards instead of
cash. Also available is labor data—how many employees worked in each job class,
whether the total hours worked corresponded to the maximum allowed by company
standards, and other information. Operations managers use such data to make fair
comparisons of a restaurant's performance relative to other CPK restaurants of similar
size and location. Finance and accounting people use the data for countless reports and
analysis. 'If IT staff had to generate the data for all those reports, we'd need at least two
more experienced people to do it,' Moon says. 'With BI/Query, the work is pushed to the
user where it should be.'

Figure 6-1: Better decision making via business intelligence.

California Pizza Kitchen Snapshot

California Pizza Kitchen signed Cotelligent to help it deploy a centralized data

warehouse that provides faster access to data. The bottom line is that California Pizza
Kitchen wanted their managers to make faster, better decisions and improve customer
service by leaving their store managers free to talk face-to-face with customers. Their
solution included a full range of Microsoft and non-Microsoft products:

Operating Systems ƒ Microsoft Windows 95

ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Server 4

Productivity ƒ Microsoft Office

Applications
ƒ Hummingbird BI/Query

Development Tools ƒ Microsoft Visual Studio 6

Server Products ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server
ƒ Microsoft SQL Server version 6.5 (and
soon 7)

ƒ Microsoft Internet Information Server

Better Decisions

Because decision makers can easily access data themselves, they can generate
financial and other business reports quickly and make decisions faster. According to
Moon, BI/Query has made CPK's decision-making process faster and more efficient
because reports that once took weeks for the information-services staff to prepare now
take minutes. Analysts spend less time hunting and gathering data and more time
analyzing it.

Decisions are also smarter. 'Before, our promotional, marketing, and analyst employees
were pretty much shooting from the hip,' Moon says. 'Managers had an idea of what was
happening in the field, but there were no facts to back up their hunches. This data
warehouse gives our knowledge workers the hard data to either support their hunches or
shoot holes in them. Operating from facts saves a lot of time and a lot of poor decisions.'

And CPK wants employees to value their customers, not data and systems. 'We want
our customers to enjoy not only great food but great atmosphere and great service,'
Moon explains. 'To achieve great service, we want our restaurant managers and staff
spending less time in the back room fussing with computer reports and more time out
front with customers. We don't want to put any tools in the field that detract from
customer service.'

Faster Reactions

CPK's data warehouse is giving the company timely, accurate information on all of its
operations. This gives the company the ability to react much faster if something's not
working. The company can quickly spot changes in spending and buying patterns and
make changes. 'Without this ability to analyze and act on your data nearly
instantaneously, you just can't catch this stuff, which means you lose money longer,'
says Moon.

The data warehouse has served as an impetus to integrate all the company's systems:
promotional, food costing, financial. Even the company's help-desk application will soon
be running on SQL Server and will be integrated with other core business systems to
some degree. With so much corporate information integrated, all decision makers will be
looking at the same numbers and making decisions based on fresh, accurate, consistent
data. That helps everyone in the company pull together rather than work at odds with
one another. 'All our smart people get smarter, and our junior people benefit from the
intelligence of our best people,' says Moon

Trend Analysis
In the spring of 1997, when HarperCollins Publishers published Underboss by Peter
Maas, bookstores went nuts. They all wanted stacks of the Mafia intrigue story that had
received lots of media hype and was quickly followed by a TV movie. But HarperCollins
was wary. In the book business, unsold product is returned at tremendous expense to
the publisher. To make sure dealers were ordering only as much as they could sell,
HarperCollins used a data-warehouse application called DataTracker, which runs on
SQL Server, to analyze daily sales data. The publisher was able to monitor sales,
regulate the flow of books into the dealer pipeline, and keep returns to an absolute
minimum. Consequently, it turned a title that could have been vastly over-ordered and
over-returned into a very profitable winner.
Like the music industry, the book business depends on hits: a hot title will often take off
in a hurry, peak in six to eight weeks, and then trail off to almost nothing. The publisher
has to get to market with the right number of books and get out without leaving a trail of
unsold copies. Unsold books are returned at nearly the full purchase price, eating up
what little profit the publisher may have made. Industry-wide, return rates run at a profit-
pounding 30 percent. HarperCollins’ objective, in creating a sales-tracking data
warehouse several years ago, was to get that return rate down, at first into the 20
percent range, and then hopefully into the teens.

To get return rates down, you have to keep a close eye on what’s selling and what’s not.
That isn’t always easy, because the industry has traditionally focused on producing lots
of titles and pushing them from warehouse to store. There was little time spent
determining whether those titles were making money. “A small number of titles carry
most publishers,” explains Lyle Anderson, chief information officer at HarperCollins. “The
trick is to know which titles are the gold mines and which are the black holes. For the
former, we want to be able to print lots and sell them quickly. For the titles that bomb, we
want to cut our losses and get out as soon as possible.” If you’re going to sell 600,000
copies of a book in just a few weeks and then sink back to zero, you have to have just-in-
time sales information. And everyone in the company needs it: sales, marketing, finance,
publishing, management, distribution, and other areas.

Simplicity Makes It Real

The problem with HarperCollins’ previous sales-tracking data warehouse was that it was
too slow, too inflexible, and too disjointed to make that information available. The data
warehouse resided on a Tandem mainframe and was updated through two AS/400
computers. Even with that entire horsepower, it took two or three days to churn through
90 gigabytes of sales data, making it impractical for doing ad hoc, drill-down queries.
Sales data was spread over at least three platforms, resulting in frequent data
disagreement. If management, marketing, and publishing asked, “Who was our most
profitable customer this month?” they were likely to get three different answers. Plus,
mid-range systems were becoming too expensive. Not only were hardware and software
costs soaring, but development costs were soaring, too.

The consistency and simplicity of the Microsoft platform held great appeal for
HarperCollins, which was feeling the cost and cumbersome weight of a heterogeneous
environment. “We were looking to simplify our world,” Anderson explains. “The old sales-
tracking data warehouse was expensive and complex; we just didn’t have the technical
expertise to manage it. We had to have something less expensive to help with our
profitability. And we had to have something faster.”

HarperCollins decided to move its data warehouse and online analytical processing
(OLAP) solution to the Microsoft platform. With SQL Server storing and fetching
information on the back end and Microsoft desktop tools—Microsoft Excel, Microsoft
Access, and Microsoft Internet Explorer browser software—delivering it on the front end,
HarperCollins entered into a whole new realm of business intelligence. Knowledge
workers throughout the company now have fast, easy access to sales, inventory, and
return data on all HarperCollins titles. They can drill down to title, type of book (business,
self-help, and so forth), customer, month, week, or any other variable to find out the
answers to questions such as the following: What was our profitability on this title this
week with this customer? Is our marketing program giving us the results we expected?
Which categories are our strongest sellers this quarter?

Making Informed Decisions

A HarperCollins financial analyst might see a drop in profitability at month’s end. Using
DataTracker, he can slice down and trace the profitability dip to business books. He can
hone in on hardback or paperback, isolate a certain category of books, and then drill all
the way down to the problem titles. “We just couldn’t pick this needle out of the haystack
before,” explains Stuart Mowat, director of decision support systems at HarperCollins.
“Once we find the problem, we can adjust the supply chain accordingly, perhaps
canceling a reprint. We can look at point-of-sale data to see if something bigger is
happening in the division as a whole. Analysts, sales people, editors, and management
are asking these kinds of questions all the time, allowing us to use data in a very
proactive fashion to impact our profitability. It’s given an awful lot of power to an awful lot
of people throughout the enterprise.”

HarperCollins sales representatives visit customers like B. Dalton and Borders with
laptops and DataTracker in hand. They pull up the customer’s orders and show them
what they’re selling and what they aren’t, which can help customers make decisions
about what they should buy based on current trends and their order histories. By helping
customers order books that will sell, HarperCollins reduces returns and thus improves its
bottom line.
Predicting the Future

Forecasting is a hot new capability delivered by DataTracker on SQL Server.

HarperCollins has long captured historical sales and return data. However, the SQL
Server-based solution allows the company to analyze that historical data a lot more cost
effectively, and the application can also capture current sales data. Combined with the
historical data, the sales data lets the company forecast sales of specific titles.

HarperCollins is bringing its general ledger data into DataTracker, adding actual
profitability data to the mix. It is also building a SQL Server database to analyze point-of-
sale data to see how specific titles are moving through the market. If the company knows
how one product is moving through the channel, it can get a feel for how other titles
might move. Best of all, says Mowat, the DataTracker/SQL Server solution gives
HarperCollins a single version of the truth. “Companies will pay a lot of money for that.
Our data warehouse on a common, accessible platform ensures that everyone in the
company is operating from the same set of data. Decisions are consistent and trackable.
When someone asks, ‘Who is our most profitable customer?’ everyone gets the same
answer.”

Results in the Pudding

HarperCollins’ Microsoft-based data warehouse is showing benefits in several other

areas. The first is speed. SQL Server query response times are at least 10 times faster
than the previous Tandem-AS/400 solution, returning results in two or three hours rather
than two or three days. Overnight run time went down by a third—from six hours to four.
That means more questions get asked, more decisions get made, and more work gets
done every day. Anderson says he was teased by colleagues when first considering SQL
Server for his large data warehouse. “It’s a toy, they told us, unsuitable for data stores
over 50 gigabytes. But we’re at 150 gigabytes today and expect to grow to a terabyte
within the next two years. We’ve proved that SQL Server is an industry-strength platform
that can scale.”

With the ability to make faster, more accurate decisions about specific titles,
HarperCollins has cut its return rate by half—from 30 percent to roughly 15 percent.
Every percentage point means millions of dollars saved. The Microsoft-based
knowledge-management solution has reduced development costs by 70 percent and has
slashed more than $700,000 out of HarperCollins’ annual IT budget. Using the Internet
Information Server technology (in Microsoft Windows NT Server) and the Microsoft
Visual InterDev Web development system, it takes HarperCollins days rather than
months to develop and deploy applications. A serendipitous benefit was the elimination
of tons of paper. Whereas all data before was delivered in thick paper reports, now it’s
delivered to users over the Web.

HarperCollins’ positive experience with its data warehouse is enabling it to connect other
areas of the company. “We’re getting people off islands and helping them talk to one
another,” Anderson says. “Production data, sales data, inventory data: it’s all available to
everyone, so we can see trends, make intelligent decisions, and react a lot faster without
the pain and angst we had before. This technology is really gluing the company together
as never before.”

Demographics
Foster Parents Plan of Canada (FPP), a leading international fund-raiser for child-
focused organizations, wanted to find a more efficient way to target prospective donors
and serve them more effectively. A member of PLAN International, FPP gives Canadians
the opportunity to sponsor a child and fund a variety of programs in developing countries.
Designed to make a lasting difference in the lives of children, their families, and their
communities, FPP programs support health care, education, access to clean water,
housing, and micro credit. More than 90,000 Canadians sponsor 100,000 of the more
than 1.1 million children worldwide who are helped by this international organization.
Although FPP has been around for more than 60 years and boasts an established donor
base, competition for funding remains a challenge. At this writing, there are more than
70,000 registered charities in Canada, and that number is always rising. Moreover, what
worked 20 years ago in reaching prospective donors does not necessarily work today.
Communication tools are evolving, demographics are constantly shifting, and
constituents are demanding faster communications and better customer service. FPP
turned to its information technology (IT) department for help in getting fast access to
information that could help the organization better respond to donor demands.

Foster Parents Plan Snapshot

Foster Parents Plan of Canada was forced to implement a knowledge-management

solution in order to operate more effectively. It needed to uncover data buried in its
systems in order to make better business decisions, such as how many children
needed sponsors and so on. The company’s data-warehouse solution gives employees
real-time operational data and allows them to make well informed, timely decisions that
decrease costs and improve efficiency. The following Microsoft products were used in
the company’s solution:

Operating ƒ Microsoft Windows 95

Systems
ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Workstation

ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Server

Productivity ƒ Microsoft Project

Applications
ƒ Microsoft Internet Explorer

ƒ Microsoft Office 95 and 97

Server ƒ Microsoft SQL Server

Products
ƒ Microsoft SNA Server

ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server

Digging Up Information

In the area of marketing strategies, FPP needed to first dig up valuable background
information such as which communication vehicles work the best, how to retain
sponsors, how many children currently require sponsors, and much more. To help
accomplish these goals, the organization built a data warehouse to help turn raw
operational data into meaningful, actionable business knowledge—knowledge that helps
employees make fast, informed decisions and maximize organizational dollars. The FPP
solution is built on a Microsoft SQL Server 7 database and other Microsoft BackOffice
products, using Cognos business intelligence tools for desktop analysis.

With a legacy IT system housing its most critical data, FPP sought to set up an entirely
new technology base. The organization knew it required a comprehensive knowledge-
management strategy to put information at managers’ fingertips. The system needed to
be structured in a manner that would allow employees to spot trends and extract
information needed for making decisions.

However, the information required for making decisions was located within the
organization’s AS/400 host applications. Kelvin Cantafio, chief information officer for
Foster Parents Plan, explains, “While our AS/400 is great at taking in our operational
data, it is often inefficient at outputting the available data for analysis purposes. Our
departments need specific information on a daily, weekly, monthly, and ad hoc basis,
which is difficult to extract from this host system.” To stay efficient, the company’s
information had to be streamlined and better organized, to capture the natural flow of
data and help deliver it to individuals with on-demand fluidity.

To get on top of a solution, Cantafio’s staff worked in concert with Microsoft Certified
Solution Provider M.R.S. Company Limited of Mississauga, Ontario. Together, they
developed a data warehouse based on the Microsoft BackOffice family of products.
Foster Parents Plan had standardized on Microsoft Office products back in 1996 to
improve overall office productivity, so selecting BackOffice as its enterprise operating
platform made sense and promised consistency for broader sharing of information
internally. Several qualities needed to be threaded into the system to provide access to
organizational data that can be easily dissected by all key business measures. A set of
tools to effectively analyze and present information was also required. The organization
knew that implementing these critical components would enable it to reach new heights.

Providing Systemic Access

Foster Parents Plan made sure that business people from all areas of the organization
were represented on the data-warehouse team. “We needed to give key decision makers
quick and easy access to critical information that allows them to make the most of our
resources,” Cantafio explains. “To make fast, accurate decisions that get results for our
constituents and chew up a minimum of cycles, our managers need detailed breakdowns
of important information about expenses, supporters, and resources. A data warehouse
is a perfect vehicle for this.”

M.R.S. helped implement the BackOffice portion of the solution. The provider’s director
of marketing and sales, Peter Christopoulos, says the solution has revamped Foster
Parents Plan’s IT structure and delivered an effective knowledge-management strategy.
“This deployment has realized phenomenal results,” he says. “Six months after we
launched the pilot project, everyone was generating reports and analyzing information
straight from the system. It has really improved the way FPP operates.” Cantafio noted
that under the new system, users themselves can get answers that used to require IT
intervention. “We now call it self-serve information; it’s empowering users to build their
own reports, answer their own questions, without waiting on IT,” he says. At FPP, the
knowledge-management solution partnered technology with corporate cultures and
business processes, so each aspect of the solution became a vehicle to manage and
deliver the business information. The diversity of knowledge sources can now be
embraced, giving it greater meaning through its relation to other information within the
organization.

Cantafio has indicated that the FPP data marts have raised the bar of knowledge within
the organization. “It’s one thing to put Microsoft Windows in an organization. It’s quite
another to make operational data available to every business manager for analysis. By
using real-time data to make real-time business decisions, we operate more efficiently
and maximize the dollars we spend on programs.”

Wrap Up
Knowledge-management systems make better decision making possible through
analysis and collaboration:
 ƒ By centralizing information, knowledge management connects the islands of
data, simplifying access and making for more informed decisions.
ƒ An effective knowledge-management system helps knowledge workers
analyze data at a more granular level than was previously possible.
ƒ Knowledge management puts the decision-making process where it belongs
by making the data that knowledge workers require available to them.
ƒ Two key attributes of a knowledge-management system that supports
business analysis are the timeliness and accuracy of the information it
provides.
ƒ Simplicity improves turn-around time and therefore ensures that knowledge
workers are more willing or even able to use the analysis tools available to
them.

Taking Stock
1. Can your company define the competitive pressures on it?
2. Does your company have the ability to accurately forecast sales?
3. Is the information that your IT systems provide granular enough for
knowledge workers to make good decisions?5.
4. Do your IT systems turn around reports in a timely manner so that
decisions are also timely and knowledge workers don’t hesitate to rely
on them?
5. Is the data in your company centralized or is it contained in many
islands?

Action Plan
ƒ Look at your company's data and determine wheter it's connected. If it
isn't, call your IT department to action to combine the data islands.
ƒ Determine whether the people who should make decisions are
equipped with the information they require for actually making those
decisions.
ƒ If your IT systems take hours or even days to compile reports,
examine whether the combinations of products you learned about in
this chapter can improve the turn-around time of those reports.
ƒ Identify the groups of users who have or should have decision-making
authority and determine the types of reports they need to make those
decisions. Make sure those reports are available.
ƒ If your IT systems require administrators to generate reports on behalf
of users, ask your IT department to push responsibility for those
reports to users.

Part III: Technology

Chapter List
Chapter 7: Digital Dashboard
Chapter 8: Microsoft Exchange Web Storage System
Chapter 9: Wireless Solutions
Chapter 10: Intelligent Interfaces

Chapter 7: Digital Dashboard

Overview
Your car’s dashboard, with its gauges, indicators, and blinking lights never more than a
glance away, helps you make better, faster decisions as you’re barreling down the
freeway. Likewise, digital dashboards provide key information to knowledge workers so
they can make better decisions quicker in fast-paced business climates.
Digital dashboards consolidate personal, team, corporate, and external information with
single-click access to analytical and collaborative tools. Digital dashboards integrate
views of companies’ knowledge sources onto individuals’ desktops, enabling them to
make better decisions by providing immediate access to key information. In Microsoft’s
world, digital dashboards are customized solutions based on Microsoft Office (especially
on Microsoft Outlook 2000). Microsoft Certified Solution Providers or in-house
development staffs can tailor digital-dashboard solutions to the specific needs of any
company, integrating its existing systems with the analytical and collaborative tools in
products such as Office, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Digital dashboards are the first of Microsoft’s four knowledge-management initiatives.

The other three initiatives, which you will read about in this part of this book, are
Exchange Web Storage System, wireless solutions, and intelligent interfaces.

With so much information from so many sources, knowledge workers can spend hours
sifting through it just to find one key point. Digital dashboards prevent information
overload by delivering focused, vital business information through the use of filters, user-
specified categories, and summaries. Employees can access vital, high-level information
through relevant business reports on a digital dashboard. And unlike browser-only portal
solutions that deliver information from the Web or an intranet, digital dashboards
integrate information from varieties of sources. Digital dashboards organize and make it
easy to view key information from corporate applications, Web sites, team folders, and
personal files. Digital dashboards also enable knowledge workers to leverage each
other’s knowledge. Organization-wide collaboration is more difficult for global
corporations than for geographically centralized companies. Whether located in the office
next door or on another continent, workers can use a digital dashboard to locate and
communicate with experts, collaborate on projects, or research corporate presentations
and documents. Because digital dashboards are based on Office, knowledge workers
also have access to real-time tools such as Microsoft NetMeeting conferencing software
and Microsoft Windows Media Services for communicating with coworkers and receiving
training. Last, digital dashboards enable knowledge workers to make effective decisions
where many of them get their most quality time: traveling. Digital dashboards give
decision makers offline access to any source of information.

“We’re all drowning in information. The challenge is to turn that information into
knowledge and to empower our knowledge workers,” says Daryl Ann Borel, assistant
superintendent, Technology and Information Systems for the Houston Independent
School District. HISD is now implementing a digital dashboard on a pilot basis. According
to Borel, digital dashboards will help HISD meet that information challenge, making them
extremely attractive to the school district.

As the benefits of digital dashboards surface through the easy availability of more
precise information, they also become catalysts for a better understanding of information
systems. For example, it often becomes apparent that key metrics to the corporate
culture are not delivered effectively to employees in an accurate and timely manner,
which can result in a lack of focus. Digital dashboards thus become a method through
which information technology (IT) professionals can have a deeper, broader, and more
measurable impact on the company. Here’s an example in which digital dashboards
have profound effects on workers’ priorities. If a digital dashboard gives constant
feedback about customer satisfaction, workers will become significantly more sensitive to
this issue. Digital dashboards become a tool through which management can direct the
focus of a corporation.

Microsoft Office
Because digital dashboards are based on Office, they integrate the already familiar
office-productivity suite with the Web. In their simplest forms, digital dashboards are
dynamic Web pages in Outlook. They serve as windows to critical business information
and leverage the rich analysis tools, collaboration capabilities, and Internet- and
messaging-standards support built into Office. Office Web Components (OWCs) enable
companies to publish spreadsheets, charts, and databases to the Web, where others
can use a browser not only to view the documents but also to modify them and to
manage data.

Outlook is Microsoft’s popular mail and collaboration client. It enables users to store wide
varieties of data—e-mail, appointments, contacts, notes, and so on—in folders. And
because users can display any Web page in any folder to which they have access,
Outlook is the perfect tool for building digital dashboards. The client’s easy-to-use object
model enables developers to create digital dashboards quickly, too. In short, Outlook is
the dynamic portal through which knowledge workers view digital dashboards. The
dashboard integrates data from different sources, including a stock ticker, a list of
messages, and a sales chart. Imagine the possibilities of displaying in once place all the
information that’s most important to you each day, the information that affects your key
business decisions.

HISD did imagine just that and more. They developed a digital dashboard for its
administrators, superintendents, and principals to make key information available on
their desktops. Their digital dashboard includes data that shows the average daily
attendance per campus. It shows student performance on both state and national tests.
It also provides information about lunch participation, e-mail, scheduling, and weather.
HISD’s digital dashboard will also be customizable to support the differing needs of
different administrators. For example, administrators with an interest in grants and other
financial sources might see them on their dashboards, with links to funding data on Web
pages elsewhere and e-mail notification when grant information becomes available.
Similarly, instructional administrators will be able to see Web sites with lesson-plan
information and to receive e-mail notification when those sites are updated.
Outlook is just part of the story; Office also makes creating dashboard content simple for
people with no development skills. Although creating basic Web pages is fairly easy for
anyone, publishing live documents—interactive spreadsheets, charts, and databases—to
the Web once required significant technical skill. OWCs enable users of all skill levels to
publish interactive spreadsheets and databases directly to the Web. With OWCs, users
can publish spreadsheets rather than routing them as e-mail attachments; publishing
spreadsheets makes it possible for other workers in the organization to sort, filter, enter
values for formula calculations, expand and collapse details, pivot, and so on—all from
within Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Personal Digital Dashboards

The latest trend is for independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop and market
personal digital dashboards. These digital dashboards, as opposed to those created for
workgroups or entire enterprises, are for individuals and rely solely on e-mail as a
means to collaborate with other users. They provide the capability to search and
organize e-mail. They also provide the ability to display information from various
sources in a folder—typically Outlook Today.

One such example is the Personal Knowledge Portal from 80-20 Software
(http://www.80-20.com). It helps you immediately begin using a digital dashboard to
overcome e-mail chaos without disturbing the organization. In other words, it works
within Outlook 2000 to organize and search through the plethora of information in your
personal folders, but it does not require support on the server. Another example is
MSNBC, which publishes a customizable digital dashboard. Using MSNBC’s digital
dashboard, you can view the latest news, sports, weather, and stock information in
Outlook 2000—without looking for it on the Web. You can learn more about MSNBC’s
digital dashboard at http://www.msnbc.com.
Office Web Components

Increasingly, knowledge workers are turning to intranets and the Internet to share
information with each another and with customers. In the Internet’s early days, only
technical staff understood how to create and publish Web pages. Knowledge workers
were limited to using what they published. Change is coming, though, as products like
Microsoft FrontPage make it possible for anyone to create and share documents on the
Web. Office 2000 takes things a step forward. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft
Access, and Microsoft PowerPoint support HTML as a native file format. And because
Web server support is fully integrated into the Office File Save and File Open dialog
boxes, publishing Office documents to Web servers is as easy as saving a file on your
own computer’s hard disk.

But publishing a spreadsheet or database document to the Web is only half the battle.
The other half is enabling other people to interact with published documents and gain
insight that’s specific to them—not just to the publisher. For example, if you create a
spreadsheet to analyze a product’s profitability given various costs, an important aspect
of sharing that spreadsheet is enabling other users to enter different values and
recalculate the results. Likewise, if you create a PivotTable form, report, or query, an
essential part of sharing these documents is enabling other users to sort, filter, pivot, or
enter their own values.
Alone, Web browsers can’t sort, filter, or recalculate totals on Web pages; but with
OWCs, they can. OWCs, illustrated in Figure 7-1 on the next page, are a collection of
COM (Component Object Model) objects that enable the publishing of spreadsheets,
charts, and databases to the Web. They take full advantage of the rich interactivity
provided by Internet Explorer. When you use Internet Explorer to browse a Web page
that contains an OWC, you interact with the page right in your browser; you can sort,
filter, enter values for formula calculations, expand and collapse details, pivot, and so on.
The COM controls provide the interactivity. Each OWC is fully programmable, enabling
Office Solution Providers to build rich, interactive, Web-based solutions. OWCs include a
spreadsheet, a PivotTable dynamic view, a data source, and a chart:
ƒ Spreadsheet The spreadsheet component provides a recalculation
engine, a full-function library, and a simple spreadsheet user interface in
Web pages. Calculations can refer to spreadsheet cells or to any control
on the page or URL via the Internet Explorer document object model.
Office users create Web pages with spreadsheet components by saving
Excel workbooks as Web pages and by selecting the option to publish
the page interactively.
ƒ PivotTable The PivotTable dynamic-views component enables users to
analyze information by sorting, grouping, filtering, outlining, and pivoting.
The data can come from a spreadsheet range, from a relational database
(an Access or Microsoft SQL Server database), or from any data source
that supports multidimensional OLE DB (such as Microsoft Decision
Support Server). When an Excel user saves a PivotTable or QueryTable
dynamic view as an interactive Web page, the page contains a
PivotTable component. Web pages with PivotTable components can also
be created in the designer for Data Access Pages in Access.
ƒ Data Source The data-source component is the reporting engine behind
Data Access Pages and the PivotTable component. It manages
communication with back-end database servers and determines which
database records can be displayed on the page. For example, if a Data
Access Page displays orders by customer, the data source component
retrieves the order records for the customer being dis-played and
manages the sorting, filtering, and updating of those records in response
to user actions. The data-source component relies on Microsoft Active
Data Objects (ADO) for "plumbing," and, like all the Office Web
Components, it is fully programmable.
ƒ Chart The chart component graphically displays information from the
spreadsheet, from the PivotTable dynamic views, or from the data-
source component. Because it is bound directly to other controls on the
 page, the chart component updates instantly in response to user
interactions with the other components. For example, you can chart a
PivotTable view that displays sales by region. Then, in the browser, you
can pivot to display sales by product, and the chart will update
automatically without round-tripping to the Web server. When an Excel
user saves a workbook containing a chart as an interactive Web page,
the page contains a chart component. Office Web Component charts can
also be created and edited directly in the Data Access Pages designer.

Figure 7-1: Office Web Components.

Outlook Team Folders

Workers can collaborate using Outlook in ways other than publishing documents on the
Web. Outlook Team Folders enables users to organize and share information with other
knowledge workers. Some of the features include the following:
ƒ CollaborationTeams have one place to go to set up meetings, access
documents, check on tasks, and access project-related contacts lists.
ƒ Calendaring With the calendaring feature, you can post team members'
schedules to the team folder. When setting up meetings, you can
instantly see who is available when. This feature helps you schedule
appointments simply and easily, without spending precious hours
tracking down a mutually convenient time.
ƒ Document Sharing Now all relevant information and documen-tation
can be placed in one location, accessible by those with permission. Web
pages, spreadsheets, word-processing documents, and other formatted
material are available around the clock by those who need it.
ƒ Discussions Wherever you are, you can have real-time, online
discussions with members of your team. Instead of relying on the
exchange of e-mail, threaded discussions allow instant communication.
ƒ Tasks Let team members know their roles, tasks, and schedule. With a
team task list, team members have instant access to their contribution to
the project
ƒ Contact Management Have one place for team members to access the
list of contacts important to the project. As the project moves forward,
you can easily update the list so everyone on the team has the names
and contact information of the people involved.

Outlook Team Folders combines the data-storage capabilities of Exchange Server with
an intuitive, Web-based functionality. To achieve this mix of storage function and Web
interface, team folders actually reside in two locations: on the computer running
Exchange Server—for data access and storage; and on a Web server—for a Web page
interface.

Outlook Team Folders starts with a team folder’s home page, which is actually a Web
page viewed within Outlook. Similar to the Outlook Today feature, this page enables
users to view information in other folders, along with other Web pages, using the Outlook
interface. It also means that, at a glance, users get a summary of the activity in different
folders. With the Outlook View Control, which is a component of Outlook Team Folders,
the Web-based team-folder home page can host Exchange Server data and other Web-
based data, taking advantage of the richness of Outlook views. From the team folder’s
home page, users can access all information in the team folders by simply clicking links.

Microsoft BackOffice Server

Outlook is the most visible part of a digital dashboard, but Microsoft BackOffice works
behind the scenes to make it all happen. BackOffice is a family of best-of-breed server
products, optimized for Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, that provide the server
foundation for a company’s knowledge-management solutions. The BackOffice family
provides three benefits. First, BackOffice offers a broad range of capabilities, including e-
mail and collaboration; databases; Internet access; desktop management; Web search
and content management; and host connectivity. Second, BackOffice products are fully
integrated with Windows 2000 Server, meaning that there is only one set of user
accounts to manage, a consistent security model spans family members, and
administrators can use familiar Windows 2000 Server tools for application-server
management. BackOffice also integrates well with an existing UNIX, AS/400, or
mainframe environment, and it provides access to existing databases and applications.
Last, the BackOffice family of products take advantage of the Windows operating system
to reduce administrative complexity. BackOffice also integrates well with Office, making it
easy for end users to be productive when managing e-mail, analyzing databases, and
creating Web content.
Appendix A, “Microsoft Platform,” provides more technical information about how each
part of BackOffice fulfills the requirements of a knowledge-management solution. This
appendix looks at BackOffice from the perspective of a company building a knowledge-
management solution and shopping for technology. Figure 7-2 is a diagram you’ll see
again in Appendix A. It shows how the knowledge desktop, knowledge services, and the
system fit together to enable knowledge management. With regard to digital dashboards,
Outlook is the knowledge desktop. The components of BackOffice are responsible for
implementing the knowledge services and the system in this diagram. They provide
centralized management of companies’ core knowledge assets and enable seamless
delivery and tracking of those assets. Here’s how those services relate to each
component in BackOffice:
ƒ Collaboration Office and Microsoft Exchange are integrated with
collaborative capabilities that enable users to innovate together within their
familiar desktop tools. These products provide capabilities such as shared
calendars and task lists, threaded discussions, easy application creation,
and folder home pages to help groups collab- orate. In addition, Microsoft
NetMeeting contains tools for white boarding, video, chat, and application
sharing, all of which enable users to communicate and work together on
knowledge assets as they collaborate.
ƒ Content Management Content-management technologies enable people to
capture, codify, and organize experiences and ideas in central repositories
that enable seamless, intuitive access to an entire organization. Exchange,
Microsoft Site Server, and Office integrate to provide the ability to
categorize, publish, and manage documents and content. Microsoft's
knowledge-management platform also supports workflow around content,
such as versioning, approvals, routing, and locking.
ƒ Analysis Quickly spotting trends in financial and line-of-business data
enables decision makers to plan better strategies. The data warehousing
and business-intelligence features in Office and SQL enable knowledge
 workers at all levels of a corporation to better understand their markets.
Data Transformation Services enables SQL users to analyze data from any
ODBC-compliant system. Microsoft OLAP (Online Analytical Processing),
Microsoft PivotTable Services, and Office Web Components enable users
to analyze vast amounts of data in their familiar Office or browser
environments.
ƒ Search and Deliver Building teams and communities across a dispersed
organization is possible with portals built on personalized, cross-enterprise
search and delivery technologies. Site Server searches across databases,
public folders, Web sites, and file shares. In addition, it also can deliver
personalized information to either community portals or directly to users’
desktops.
ƒ Tracking and Workflow Tracking services enable companies to identify best
practices by measuring successes, while workflow tools enable the creation
of process-based applications to ensure that the practices are followed and
measured. Exchange Folder Agents and Routing Objects combine to
provide a powerful and flexible system for building workflow applications.

BackOffice and Office provide all the technologies necessary for building a knowledge-
management solution, and they are at the heart of Microsoft’s knowledge-management
platform. Also, the Team Productivity Update combines with Office and BackOffice
Server to produce collaborative, centralized, and secure team workspaces for line-of-
business data, tracking applications, documents, issues, and online discussions. The
Team Productivity Update extends the new collaboration features within Office, enabling
teams to get faster results through a central location for sharing team information.

Figure 7-2: A typical knowledge-management platform.

Collaboration

Knowledge workers must be able to send e-mail reliably, securely, and quickly. The
system must support fast responses, rules, multiple formats and styles (rich text, HTML,
and so on). It must also provide the ability to sign and encrypt messages, and it must be
able to organize the flood of information arriving by e-mail. Thus, requirements include
reliability, high performance, security, scala-bility, and interoperability with—and
migration from—existing messaging systems. Organizations also look for a growing
spectrum of collaborative capabilities that are not necessarily tied to messaging.
ƒ Individual productivity Calendars, contact lists, and one-to-one
information sharing.
ƒ Team productivity Group scheduling, shared task lists, and shared
contact lists.
ƒ Departmental productivity Discussion groups and real-time
collaboration.
ƒ Enterprise productivity Routing, workflow, and document management.
Companies can extend these features to Web-based scenarios that include structured
data and transacted applications by using Collaboration Data Objects (CDO), Active
Data Objects (ADO), and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) with Microsoft Message
Queue Server (MSMQ)—technologies within Windows NT Server. For instance, a
collaboration solution for project management enables a company to react to changing
business conditions. It makes users more productive with near-instant access to
information. It manages information by providing structure to data, enables users to
collaborate in real time (no matter where they are in the world), and enables them to
make better-informed decisions.

Content Management

Getting users and customers connected to corporate data and enabling them to interact
with it effectively is a driving goal of knowledge management. Using Web-based
applications as well as publishing and management methods, admin-istrators can bring
together new and legacy systems to provide users with access to databases, corporate
directories, documents, discussions, process applications (forms), and more. With these
tools, users can create, publish, search, and manage information easily. Administrators
and publishers can deliver, manage, and analyze the Web site and data.

Word, Windows 2000 Server’s Internet Information Services, Index Server, Site Server,
and the Microsoft Office Server Extensions are the key enabling technologies for building
an information-publishing solution that provides simple and seamless data access and
interactivity to users. The same technologies could also help establish or polish a
corporate presence on the Internet, such as an investor-information site, where content
is provided externally to customers and updated on a regular basis by a variety of people
within the organization.

Business Intelligence

All organizations need to have access to timely and reliable data to make decisions.
Data-center managers think about collecting relevant data, storing it, staging it for future
use, and making it available for users to extract, manipulate, and analyze. Business
users and administrators look at exploiting this information via analysis tools, data marts,
and data warehouses. Developers build workflow-type applications (such as document
routing) or information-management systems such as Decision Support Systems (DSS).

Knowledge workers must be able to obtain data easily for analysis using familiar tools.
They shouldn’t have to rely on the IT department to create complex front ends to
corporate databases. By using Office applications, employees have full access to data
and the tools to analyze industry-wide, corporate, and even departmental data. In
addition, employees should be able to communicate and collaborate on data analysis, in
real time, with other employees—either from headquarters or remotely. For example, a
decision-support system for sales analysis could allow anyone to examine sales data
and make better decisions based on that data.

Together, Office and BackOffice provide rich data-analysis capabilities. Office supports
connecting to back-end databases by using component-based middleware. OLE DB and
ADO provide better performance against SQL Server and other OLE DB providers, so
developers can easily create powerful applications. Office also takes a client/server
approach to dealing with very large databases, retrieving only the data the user wants to
see instead of the entire data set. And support for OLAP in Office 2000 enables it to work
tightly with SQL Server-based data marts and data warehouses. Users can display a
PivotTable dynamic view in Microsoft Excel for high-performance data analysis. This
enables them to make complicated queries against large amounts of data and across
many dimensions (time and geography, for example) and to get answers quickly.
Microsoft OLAP server technology, which is part of SQL Server, provides OLAP
services.
Tracking and Workflow

As the Web becomes more pervasive in everyday productivity, knowledge workers

recognize intranet technology as a unique and fast way to gather, track, and share
information quickly. Organizations require workflow-type applications (such as document
routing) or an information-management system such as sales-force automation tools
(lead-tracking systems and expense reporting) to support data tracking. Historically,
accessing data from an enterprise-level database was challenging for anyone other than
a database administrator or IT professional. Using Office as the front-end for data access
and corporate reporting systems makes it possible to get more directly involved.

For example, sales-force automation or sales-tracking tools enable a company’s sales

force to develop relationships with customers and delivers access to the most up-to-date
information possible. They help the company remain competitive in a fast-paced
marketplace by helping it remain in touch with its customers and supplies and by
allowing knowledge workers to make better decisions faster. Combined, Office and
BackOffice provide features that simplify the creation of powerful tracking applications:
ƒ Access supports OLE DB, enabling users to combine the ease of use of
the Access interface with the scalability of back-end enterprise
databases, such as Microsoft SQL Server, without needing to go through
the Jet database.
ƒ The Access user interface lets workers create a new type of file (.adp)
that connects directly to the integrated store available in Office or SQL
Server. This makes creating true client/server applications easier.
ƒ Microsoft updated many popular Access wizards to support new
client/server tasks, such as creating a new database, report, or form.
When users work in a Microsoft Access project, they use new design
tools to create and manage server-side objects, including tables, views,
stored procedures, and database diagrams.
ƒ Application developers can build custom workflow solutions to automate
business tasks, create more effective teams, and make better use of the
knowledge available throughout an enterprise. Exchange Server and
Outlook provide a comprehensive set of tools for building workflow
applications, including the Exchange Scripting Agent and Routing
Objects, and the Outlook drag-and-drop tools, with full support for Visual
Basic Scripting for creating electronic forms.
ƒ Data Access Pages are interactive, dynamically linked HTML pages that
let users analyze and manipulate data from within a Web browser. Data
can be included within the context of the page or linked from a SQL
Server database. Developers can store pages on a Web server or file
system, in Exchange Public Folders, or as e-mail attachments.
Dashboard Development
To get the ball rolling, take a look at the samples in Microsoft’s Digital Dashboard Starter
Kit. This kit comes with the documentation, files, and samples necessary to hit the
ground running. Free of charge, the kit is available for download from
http://www.microsoft.com/business. Using this kit or viewing its samples requires no
technical skills. The samples do require Outlook 2000, however. If you’re not comfortable
evaluating the kit yourself, pass it on to someone in the IT department and have them
evaluate it. Let them wow you with the types of information they can put on your desktop.
This is precisely where Oregon State University started its work.

Oregon State University is an example of an organization that’s leading the digital-

dashboard revolution. The school wants to use technology to give students, faculty, and
administrators competitive advantages by helping them master the plethora of
information they must assimilate. The school is doing so successfully because it’s
adopting the digital dashboard as part of its knowledge-management solution. Greg
Scott, the information services manager for the school, says that they wanted to make
the network easier for everyone to access; they adopted the digital dashboard because it
helps the school provide a single point through which to access files and information.
Scott consulted students, MIS department faculty, and a key administrator to help refine
ideas for the two digital-dashboard versions they were contemplating: one for students,
which provides class information and collaborative communications with faculty and
other students, and one for staff, which helps manage projects that involve coordination
of documents, tasks, and calendars. Scott had numerous people examining prototypes,
and their feedback validated the developers’ work. According to Scott, “One
management professor reminded us that less is more. That was very helpful because
there’s a tendency to treat this like a Christmas tree and hang ornaments all over the
place, inundating people with data. We’re focusing on only key metrics to keep a
streamlined design.”
For more information about managing and developing knowledge-management
solutions, and overcoming cultural barriers to this kind of innovation, see Chapter 2,
“Organizational Barriers.” This chapter shows how to manage expectations, develop a
prototype, and get the whole organization behind your effort.

Products for Dashboards

Microsoft Office 2000 provides the user interface for a digital dashboard. Outlook 2000
is the typical messaging and collaboration client, while users can use Office Web
Components to publish dynamic documents to an intranet. The combination of Office
2000 and each of the following Microsoft products is available for building digital
dashboards and are in fact typical components:

ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server Provides the backend for Outlook 2000

and allows users to create shared team folders for docu-ments,
discussions, project tasks, and so on. The integration between Outlook
and Exchange Server enables users to take folders offline when they
travel and synchronize when they return.
ƒ Microsoft SQL Server Enables knowledge workers to connect directly
to business data and analyze it as required. OLAP provides
sophisticated and flexible analysis using familiar tools such as Microsoft
Excel.

Developing the Prototype

Developing the prototype dashboard was very easy, according to Scott, because his
team is working with familiar Microsoft tools—such as the Microsoft Visual InterDev Web
development system—and because of the technology updates that Microsoft offers as
part of the digital-dashboard initiative, including the Digital Dashboard Starter Kit, Team
Folder Wizard, and Team Productivity Update for the BackOffice family. They leveraged
the samples and wizards that Microsoft provides, speeding up development. Scott says
that it would have taken two months to do what they did in a single week. Part of their
success, and the short amount of time in which they realized it, is due to the ability to
borrow code directly from the digital-dashboard samples in the Digital Dashboard Starter
Kit. The Team Folder Wizard also saved them weeks of development work. Scott adds,
“We found the examples especially helpful in giving us ideas and as a construction
resource.”

To create their prototype, Scott’s team is using one of the starter-kit samples as a base,
cutting and pasting existing controls, object tags, and parameters, and changing the
labels as appropriate to reflect their specific needs. They’re using the Team Folders
Wizard to create the customized folders that hold information, such as reading lists, and
interactive components, such as instructor/student and student/student e-mail discussion
threads. The wizard walks instructors through the process of creating team folders for
each class, virtually generating each folder and then allowing them to name it and to
specify its location.

Scott says he regards team folders as an advance over the Exchange Public Folders
that the school used to disseminate course-related material and as a collection point for
students to submit their work. Team folders permit far more collaboration and
dynamically update themselves to reflect modifications created on-the-fly by instructors.
Faculty can easily set permissions, links, and other parameters. Folders can even
integrate with Microsoft NetMeeting conferencing software for enhanced interactivity in
online discussions. Instructors had the option to create and use online discussions
before this, but without the simple and fully integrated interface of the digital dashboard,
they were less likely to do so. Public folders required students and faculty to drill down
through the folders’ view, sort through all the class public folders, and find the right
material.
With the digital dashboard and team folders, this isn’t necessary. Students and faculty
look under their class nugget—the dashboard’s basic unit of organization, which can be
any dynamic data, such as Microsoft ActiveX technologies, ASP, or XML—to see all the
course information necessary for that class. The faculty will use team folders more
frequently because the school enabled discussions within those folders. The ease of
creating team folders also led Scott's team to experiment with them more broadly. They
can house team folders on separate Active Server Pages (server-side scripts in Internet
Information Server) or combine them into a single set, based on how much information
the designers want to provide to users at once. Being able to quickly compose prototype
folders enabled Scott’s team to create various designs and share them with potential
users for feedback, enabling better, user-friendly results.

Creating the Dashboard

Norman Rankis is the CIO of Centenary College. He met with members of Microsoft’s
Higher Education staff to review the school’s existing information reports and to adapt
and elaborate on that content to develop health indicators that are meaningful to
Centenary. For financial aid, for example, that meant expanding the available information
to show how well financial-aid distribution at any time matched the school’s strategic plan
for its student population. Rankis then brought in Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) to
look at the college’s infrastructure and to recommend hardware to support the
dashboard. On the recommendation of MCS, the college installed a Compaq server to
support this first dashboard project. “The MCS plan was like a plug that fit right into our
environment,” says Rankis.

According to Rankis, development was straightforward, due in part to the Digital

Dashboard Starter Kit. Rankis used his existing databases for enrollment, financial aid,
and retention, and he developed simple SQL programs to query his third-party,
commercial databases. The digital dashboard integrates the data from queries and
populates the dashboard components.

Institutional-aid data comes from one of those third-party packages, the College Boards
PowerFaids Financial Aid System. An industry standard that’s updated regularly to
reflect new federal regulations for financial aid, the software was part of the university’s
IT infrastructure and works flawlessly with the digital dashboard. The software reports
both budgeted and actual breakdowns for both categories within Institutional Aid: new
and returning students. “The nice thing about the digital dashboard is that it shows key
data at a glance, and if the executive needs to pull down the entire Institutional Aid
budget, he can, right from the dashboard,” says Rankis. The dashboard’s data on
enrollment, retention, and receivables all come from CAMS (Comprehensive Academic
Management System), a Three Rivers Systems Inc. package widely used by small
colleges and universities. “The dashboard design doesn’t care from which sub-system
the data is coming,” notes Rankis. “As long as we can populate the spreadsheet data,
the dashboard works.”

Rankis chose this particular initial approach—isolating the digital dashboard from third-
party software—to ensure that the school was not infringing on copyright or contractual
use of that software by exposing its database structures, especially if the school later
makes its design available to other institutions. Although the intermediate data-import
layer was a concession to this practical issue, Rankis says it resulted in the cleanest,
most robust structure for the information system. The program runs automatically on a
regular update cycle far in excess of the frequency provided by paperbound alternatives.
Wrap Up
ƒ The term digital dashboard is much newer than the ability to combine data
sources within a specific user interface. Decision support systems are not
new. What make digital dashboards so exciting are the possibilities that
combining different aspects of knowledge management provide.
ƒ Digital dashboards consolidate personal, team, business, and other types of
information, and they provide a single user interface from which to access it
all.
ƒ Knowledge workers are more likely to focus on the business's priorities if the
information required to make decisions in support of those priorities is
readily available.
ƒ Digital dashboards can display data from numerous, unrelated sources in one
user interface, helping knowledge workers gain more insight from what they
see.
ƒ Digital dashboards are easy to build, and the Digital Dashboard Starter Kit
provides plenty of samples from which you can build your own dashboard.
ƒ Office Web Components (OWCs) enable any user, regardless of skill, to
publish interactive information that's suitable for a digital dashboard.
ƒ Outlook Team Folders help users organize and share information by providing
for shared collaboration, calendaring, document sharing, discussions,
shared task lists, and contact management.
ƒ Behind the scenes, BackOffice supports digital dashboards by pro-viding
knowledge services for collaboration, content management, analysis,
searching, and workflow management.

Taking Stock
1. Do you have a highly visible group that can pilot a digital dashboard?
2. Does your business have someone to champion the use of digital
dashboards?
3. Have you identified the most important knowledge sources for each
group?
4. Will you require different digital dashboards for different groups?
5. Is your business replacing a knowledge portal or starting fresh?
6. Does your business use or plan to deploy the Office family of
products?
7. Does your business have the infrastructure available to support digital
dashboards?9.
8. Is a development staff available to create a digital dashboard for your
business?
9. Have you conducted a needs assessment to confirm business
requirements?

Action Plan
ƒ Download and experiment with the samples in the Digital Dashboard
Starter Kit, and read Digital Dashboard Business Process
Assessment Guide. Both resources are available at
http://www.microsoft.com/business.
ƒ Identify the different digital dashboards that your business will require.
It's likely that you'll require different digital dashboards for different
disciplines.
ƒ Get key employees from each department involved in the design
process.
ƒ Identify the knowledge sources that must be available on each digital
dashboard. For example, a digital dashboard for sales might include
sales projections while a digital dashboard for development might
include project-management statistics.
ƒ Create a plan for your company’s digital dashboards.
 Microsoft Exchange Web Storage
Chapter 8:

System
Overview
Web Storage System unifies e-mail, documents, and other knowledge sources in a
single repository that knowledge workers can access through any application that
supports Internet-based standards.

Web Storage System, one of Microsoft's key knowledge-management initiatives,

removes barriers to collaboration that knowledge workers face today. It combines the
features of a file system, the Web, and a collaboration server into a single location for
storing and managing information as well as building and running applications. This
platform for managing information includes consistent mechanisms for searching,
categorizing, and retrieving data. Web Storage System is a new feature in Microsoft
Exchange Server, which includes other new features that help companies build
knowledge-management solutions.

Specifically, Web Storage System provides a single repository for managing e-mail,
documents, Web pages, and other resources within one infrastructure, integrating
knowledge sources in a single location. It supports offline access, remote client access,
and support for a range of APIs that enable developing knowledge-management
solutions. Also, Web Storage System serves as a platform for unified messaging, which
enables knowledge workers to access personal information, such as their calendar and
contacts, as well as e-mail and voicemail messages. Knowledge-management solutions
typically require three key services. First, they require file system services that enable
the knowledge desktop to read and write documents as well as store streaming data
such as audio, video, and so on. File system services include a data model that supports
hierarchical and heterogeneous collections (folders containing any type of item in any
folder). Knowledge-management solutions also require database services to provide
queries beyond what is possible on files in the file system. Database services include
atomic updates that enable applications to present a consistent view to knowledge
workers when updates involve more than one item in Web Storage System. Last,
knowledge-management solutions require collaboration services to provide messaging,
contact, calendaring support, and real-time collaboration.

Web Storage System is the second of Microsoft's four knowledge-management

initiatives. The other three initiatives, which you read about in this part of this book, are
digital dashboards, wireless solutions, and intelligent interfaces.
Web Storage System provides all these services in one well-integrated package, making
it easier for knowledge workers to find, use, and share information. Developers can use
Web Storage System to expand their use of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office, and
Microsoft BackOffice as platforms for knowledge management and to provide a wide
range of business solutions that lower the total cost of ownership and improve
productivity throughout an enterprise. For more information about how Office and
BackOffice fit into Microsoft's knowledge-management initiatives, see Chapter 7, 'Digital
Dashboards,' which describes other platform components.

Web Storage System

Web Storage System adds numerous features to Exchange that enable companies to
build knowledge-management solutions using Microsoft’s knowledge-management
platform. The sections that follow describe these new features and capabilities:
ƒ Standards Support
ƒ Rich HTML
ƒ Win32 Interfaces
ƒ Advanced Scripting
ƒ Streaming Store
 ƒ Content Indexing

Standards Support

Web Storage System provides an important feature for any knowledge-management

solution: the ability to access any item in Web Storage System via HTTP, the protocol
that Web browsers use to download documents on the Internet. Support for HTTP
means that any Web browser, including digital dashboards, can display documents in the
Web Storage System. Also, every item in Web Storage System has a unique, readable
address associated with it, making that item easy to retrieve.

With current Web servers, such as Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Microsoft
Internet Information Server, developers must enable HTTP requests to access files or
records. But Web Storage System provides out-of-the-box integration with Web servers,
enabling developers to make each item in Web Storage System accessible without
having to write a single line of code. In addition, Web Storage System can be accessed
through the DAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning) extensions to HTTP found in
Microsoft Internet Information Server 5. DAV makes development easier.

Web Storage System is also an XML store. Its support for XML provides content in an
Internet-standard format. This makes providing data access services to developers who
need to query and modify information in Web Storage System easier.

Rich HTML

Extending its support for Internet-based standards, Web Storage System automatically
provides an HTML 3.2 view of a folder and its objects based on each item’s properties.
Also, Web Storage System provides native support for advanced Web browsers that
support HTML 4. This support enables administrators to provide knowledge workers with
Web-based access to its content. In this figure, you see a view of Web Storage System
within Internet Explorer.

Win32 Interfaces
Web Storage System supports the same interfaces that developers use to read and write
data to the file system. Doing so enables developers to leverage functionality that’s
already available in the file system. For example, in writing for Microsoft Windows,
developers can use Win32 APIs such as CreateFile, ReadFile, and WriteFile.

The kicker is that administrators can share data in Web Storage System the same way
they share files on a file server. They use the commands net share, net use, and so on.
Alternatively, they can share Web Storage System files using the operating system’s
interface, which is easier to use but not scriptable. This enables developers to port Web
applications that they built solely around the file system to Web Storage System simply
by changing the virtual directory.

Last, support for Win32 programming interfaces is beneficial to knowledge workers. It

enables them to use tools with which they’re already familiar to access their documents,
e-mail, messages, and other types of files.

Advanced Scripting

Most Web applications require more functionality than what's available through Win32's
programming interfaces and support for the file system. For example, numerous Web
applications use scripts to add complex behaviors rather than serving up static HTML
documents. (Mouse rollovers, outlines, and other navigational features are examples.)
By making every item in Web Storage System accessible by an address, Web Storage
System supports ASP (Active Server Pages.) An example of an ASP script is one that
returns a different Web page depending on the user’s client and one that processes a
form that a user submits. Scripting support involves more complexity than merely the
ability to host ASPs, however.
In addition, Web Storage System supports the same database interfaces used by ADO
scripts in building data-intensive Web applications. Web Storage System comes with an
OLE DB 2.5 provider that supports ADO scripting, as well as database services such as
SQL query support and transaction support. The Web Storage System query support
includes full-text content indexing to enable efficient retrieval of all items that contain a
string for a single folder or for a hierarchy of folders.

Streaming Store

No longer are e-mail messages just unformatted text. They include large attachments,
multimedia, voice files, and even rich HTML formatting. These new capabilities enrich
knowledge workers’ messaging and collaboration experience, but they place a heavy
burden on any system, regardless of how much iron you throw at it.

Web Storage System’s streaming-store feature addresses this truth by enabling it to

natively store very large messages and attachments. Client programs access multimedia
data more quickly through file-streaming interfaces, increasing the performance and
scalability of a system that uses Web Storage System. For example, Web Storage
System enables the streaming-media feature of PowerPoint 2000, which enables users
to save PowerPoint slides as NetShow files. The streaming store helps ensure the
fidelity of data and lowers the number of file conversions.

Also, Web Storage System enables administrators to provide streaming-media support

directly from Web Storage System. This means that administering and managing
streaming resources are the same as managing any other type of Web Storage System
content.

Content Indexing

Web Storage System provides fast searches and lookups by managing indexes for
common key fields. Microsoft Outlook users can search for documents in the Web
Storage System as easily as they can search for messages today. They can be more
productive. With full-text search, Outlook text searches become extremely fast. For
example, Outlook searches that once took several minutes now take seconds.
Additionally, Outlook indexes and searches all the text in attachments.

Administration
Managing a single, unified storage system based on Web Storage System enables IT
administrators to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). Costs for backup, restore, and
other routine maintenance will naturally decline as administrators need to manage only
one storage engine for multiple applications. As shown in Figure 8-1, Web Storage
System enables centralized administration. Training costs will drop and the maintenance
learning curve will soften, as administrators no longer have to manage mail servers, file
servers, and Web servers separately to host knowledge workers’ data. Web Storage
System gives companies a single repository for all this and more.

If you deploy Web Storage System as a unified storage engine, knowledge workers will
be able to store e-mail messages, documents, Web pages, and collaborative information
in the same shared storage. This process is invisible to users, even though they save
data using different clients, such as Outlook, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, and so
on. If all back-end servers are Web Storage System servers, administrators need to
learn only one toolset to configure, monitor, back up, and restore one type of server. This
reduces long-term training costs and lowers the learning curve for both new and
experienced IT administrators.
Figure 8-1: Centralized administration with Web Storage System.

Web Storage System extends all the management features traditionally available for
messaging and collaboration data into document storage of all kinds. Administrators can
easily configure things like data-replication topology, database-storage quotas, and
granular administrative and access control.
As far as administration goes, your IT department will be more concerned with a few
abstract concepts. The next sections will discuss some of those concepts in more detail:
ƒ Scalability How performance grows with additional resources.
ƒ Reliability How long the system runs without failing.
ƒ Security How protected the system is from intrusion as well as accidents.
ƒ Integration How well the system integrates with other systems.

Scalability
Web Storage System enables administrators to distribute storage across multiple
physical databases, a design feature that provides numerous advantages. Web Storage
System can grow in a virtual sense while limiting risk and maintaining granular control by
using multiple databases to keep individual database sizes small. Multiple databases
also decrease backup and recovery time, helping ensure conformity to service-level
agreements while enabling your business to scale servers easily. Your server capacity is
limited only by the amount of hardware storage available, as Figure 8-2 shows.
Increasing the virtual-storage capacity of the Web Storage System by distributing data
on multiple databases and servers is invisible to knowledge workers.

Multiple databases also provide administrators a wider range of design flexibility.

Administrators have a plethora of ways to distribute data across multiple databases
available to Web Storage System. Administrators can target databases at specific
classes of users. For example, on a particular server, data for executives might be
hosted on a set of databases different from those that hold data used by other
employees. This enables administrators to control the configuration of each database,
such as the content-indexing settings, data-retention intervals, and folder-storage limits.
Also, they can control service levels and outage time due to failure by limiting the amount
of data that users can store in each database.
Figure 8-2: Distributing Web Storage System databases.

Alternatively, administrators can randomly distribute data across all databases in Web
Storage System, minimizing the impact of a disaster to any one particular department or
function of an organization. For instance, three storage databases can equally share
data for the finance, accounting, and legal departments. If there is a failure in any one of
these databases, none of the departments is critically impaired. In either example,
administrators maintain control over which data resides in a particular database and
determining the configuration parameters of each database.

Reliability

Web Storage System gives your business unprecedented reliability, even as it scales,
and ensures the integrity of mission-critical data. Web Storage System supports
transaction logging at the database level. It uses write-ahead transaction logs to ensure
data integrity through redundancy and to provide transactional security. Committed
transactions, such as saving an item in a folder, are written to disk with assurance.
Temporary interruptions such as power failures won’t cause data loss, because Web
Storage System can replay the transaction logs to restore data into the database files.
Within folders, Web Storage System supports data replication so that even if one of your
servers is down, replicas of that data exist on other servers. Additionally, replication
management enables administrators to effectively load balance application access. Web
Storage System also improves reliability through support for multiple databases, which
you read about in the previous section. Using multiple databases means that a failure in
a single database results in little impact to the overall down time of a larger system,
removing the fabled single point of failure. Web Storage System can restore the failed
database while the other databases remain mounted and in service. Figure 8-3 illustrates
a scenario whereby Web Storage System replicates data across three databases, and if
any of them fails, the system remains up and running.

At the system level, Web Storage System fully supports Windows 2000 clustering. Web
Storage System on one server can accept control over the data being managed by Web
Storage System on another server that has just experienced a failure, minimizing down
time. And the processing of failing over to the other server is invisible to users.

Security

Web Storage System extends Windows 2000’s security model to individual items and
fields. Based on Windows 2000 Access Control Lists (ACLs), administrators can grant or
deny permission for users to read, write, edit, or delete specific items. Administrators can
determine users’ views of a folder’s contents on an item-by-item and even by a field-by-
field basis.
Figure 8-3: Web Storage System Replication

Note that Web Storage System uses native Windows 2000 ACLs. Administrators must
manage only a single set of security groups, and those groups apply to data stored in
both Web Storage System and Windows 2000 file shares. In fact, they can use the ACL
editor in Windows Explorer to set permissions on individual items in Web Storage
System. Once again, a single paradigm for security management enables customers to
control and reduce administrative training costs.

Integration

Microsoft designed Web Storage System for optimal management within Windows 2000.
It can fully leverage Active Directory configuration information while respecting the
security settings enabled by Windows 2000 ACLs. Those who are already familiar with
Windows 2000 administration will find supporting and managing Web Storage System
simple, because many of the concepts are the same. As you’ve already read, Web
Storage System is fully integrated with the Windows 2000 security infrastructure and the
file-system infrastructure, and it supports management via Active Directory and Microsoft
Management Console.

Active Directory

Active Directory is the directory service in Windows 2000 Server. Windows NT Server 4
and earlier versions didn’t have a directory service. Active Directory enables easier and
more centralized administration. For example, rather than using one program to
administer users, another to administer computers, and yet another to manage policies,
administrators do all of those things by using Active Directory Users and Computers.
Active Directory catalogs everything on the network, so administrators can manage the
network from a single point (even their own desktop), instead of managing each
domain controller separately.

Users see Active Directory not as an administrative tool but as a catalog of everything
that’s on the network. It includes printers, other users, computers, and so on. Users
can search the directory to find the printer nearest them with certain features, for
example, or they can more easily find the computer that contains particular files.

Active Directory makes networks simpler and more secure. It provides the
infrastructure for a network’s security, including technologies such as Kerberos, a
protocol that authenticates users when they log on to the network. It also allows
companies to organize the directory using organization units (typically created along
line-of-business boundaries) and then apply policies to each organizational unit
individually. Rather than creating several domains that several domain controllers
 manage, they can create far fewer domains, divided into organizational units, with
fewer domain controllers. Companies are already realizing dramatic TCO benefits.

For more information about Active Directory, see http://www.microsoft.com. Optionally,

ask your IT department for a tour of Windows 2000 Server's directory service and let
them wow you with its capabilities.

Productivity Enhancements
Because Web Storage System enables users to access information using any client
program, knowledge workers are more productive. Mechanically, opening the file you
want with whatever client you happen to be using is quicker than exiting your current
application and opening up a new one. Users can access information in Web Storage
System using applications with which they are already familiar. For example, they can
use tools like Office applications, Windows Explorer, or any Internet browser to find and
edit information in Web Storage System.

The effect on TCO is immediate. The business does not have to retrain users, and
administrators can take advantage of Web Storage System using skills they already
possess. Training is not an issue. And because Web Storage System puts documents
and applications in a single place, knowledge workers look in one place for documents,
discussions, or any collaborative information. Also, administrators have only one
technology to set up and administer but can provide users with the best collaborative
solution to solve their business problems. Last, Web Storage System’s native support for
Internet protocols means that users can use any Internet-standard client to find and
retrieve information. Support for two protocols, NNTP and SMTP, enables users to
create and view newsgroup discussions as well as Internet-standard e-mail using Web
Storage System.

Office 2000

Web Storage System enables Office 2000 users to store and retrieve documents within
desktop applications such as Word. They can save documents directly into Web Storage
System using the native File Save dialog box and can open them by using the File Open
dialog box, two tools with which they should already be familiar. This enables users to
leverage the security, replication, accessibility, and powerful workflow capabilities of Web
Storage System as a repository for Office documents. Users can store all related
information, e-mail messages, tasks, documents, or spreadsheets in a single folder and
can access this folder from any client, including Windows Explorer, Outlook, Microsoft
Outlook Express, or a Web browser.
An important characteristic of Web Storage System is its capability to store custom
properties on the items stored in its database. Office users can leverage the power of
Outlook to view, sort, and manage shared and personal documents with the same tools
they currently use for e-mail, calendar, and contacts. The property promotion feature of
Web Storage System provides a consistent view of information that is independent of the
client used for access. Properties are automatically promoted from documents,
populating all record fields like those for document author, title, and so on. Web Storage
System shows different file types as entries; properties for each are promoted, and you
can search across all your information, regardless of application type. Users can access
this unified view of information in consistent ways across multiple clients. Accessing this
unified view of information eliminates the need to open and close applications to view
and access different types of data. It provides a view of all available user resources in
one glance, enhancing productivity.
Outlook has always provided powerful replication features that work with Exchange
Server so that knowledge workers can use collaborative information online and offline.
With Windows 2000, they’ll gain the benefit of synchronizing file shares for use when
disconnected from their network. This feature is Offline Folders, illustrated in Figure 8-4.
With Web Storage System, any Windows 2000 user can take advantage of Offline
Folders against a Web Storage System to synchronize the contents of that Web Storage
 System without having any specific client installed on their machine. Thus, by integrating
with the Offline Folders feature, users can take advantage of a familiar replication model
built into the operating system without any additional training by their IT department.
Support for Offline Folders is indeed one of the greatest benefits of Web Storage
System. Unlike the process before Web Storage System, users won’t need to prepare to
go offline by explicitly synchronizing folders and data. The process is transparent to them
regardless of whether their applications are connected to or disconnected from the
network. Collaborative applications become connection independent.

Figure 8-4: Offline Folders.

Collaboration Objects

Web Storage System provides out-of-the-box functionality for the most common
collaboration scenarios, which include messaging, contacts, calendaring, and workflow.
It provides an object model that developers can use to develop applications for Web
Storage System. When combined with the powerful development tools that work with
Web Storage System, this object model provides developers with an ideal collaborative
development platform. Further, because these objects are integrated with the Web
Storage System, developers do not have to create knock-off solutions for common
scenarios, fueling rapid application development.

Development Tools

Web Storage System supports APIs such as OLE DB and ADO. As a result, it can
leverage power development tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio, which makes
developers more productive immediately without requiring training. And because Web
Storage System supports Internet-based standards, developers can use tools like
Microsoft FrontPage to develop Web-based applications for Web Storage System.

Unified Messaging
Exchange Server and Web Storage System are at the heart of one of Microsoft’s most
ambitious initiatives: unified messaging. The goal of unified messaging, also known as a
messaging center, is to provide a single place to access e-mail, voice mail, faxes, and
pages, rather than using separate systems for each.
Just as important as a messaging center is the idea of universal access. That is, users
can access their messages from any telephone, any online computer, or any
combination of the two. Users have access to information anytime, anywhere. Microsoft
extends this idea to include intelligent assistants, which automatically manage the
knowledge worker’s messaging center. Thus, Microsoft’s definition of unified messaging
is universal access to an intelligent messaging center able to manage e-mail, voice mail,
faxes, and pages.

While Exchange Server is at the heart of unified messaging, providing some support for
it already, other initiatives in this book also play key roles:
ƒ Digital Dashboard Enables users to manage their e-mail, voice mail, faxes,
and pages through their digital dashboard see Chapter 7, "Digital
Dashboard".
 ƒ Wireless Solutions Enable universal access to users' messages by allowing
them to access their mailboxes using wireless phones and similar devices
see Chapter 9, "Wireless Solutions".
ƒ Intelligent Interfaces Provide intelligent assistants, the third part of
Microsoft’s vision for unified messaging see Chapter 10, “Intelligent
Interfaces”.

Exchange Server has started this process of evolution by providing a unified mailbox. All
of the technology is not yet in place to make it a reality, however. And further in the
future, Microsoft wants to eliminate the distinction between different types of
technologies. Exactly how and on what media the system delivers a message will no
longer be important. The system will just use what is most appropriate. In other words, a
message will just be a message, no matter how it’s delivered.

Wrap Up
Web Storage System, a new feature in Exchange 2000, provides knowledge workers a
single place in which to store all information for a given topic. The type of document
containing the information doesn’t matter either, and users have access to it in any
application they happen to be using at the time. Significant capabilities of Web Storage
System include the following:
ƒ Web Storage System provides a single database for messaging, collaboration,
document storage, and Web-enabled applications.
ƒ Numerous applications can access Web Storage System, including Outlook,
Outlook Express, FrontPage, Office, Windows Explorer, any Web browser,
or any other 32-bit application for Windows.
ƒ Users can save Office documents directly to Web Storage System by using
the File Save dialog box; also, they can open documents directly from Web
Storage System.
ƒ Users can access any item in Web Storage System by using a friendly
address (URL) from their Web browser or from any other application.
ƒ Web Storage System supports custom properties, enabling richer indexing,
searching, and organization of documents within the database.
ƒ Web Storage System includes built-in indexing to provide high-speed and
accurate full-text searching, even within messages' attachments.
ƒ Web Storage System supports DAV, a new protocol based on HTTP that
enables people to collaborate on documents over the Web, regardless of
the tools used to create the document.
ƒ Developers can use XML to deliver structured data from other applications.
ƒ Web Storage System supports scripting and ASP, enabling it to host Web
pages.
ƒ Administrators can store Web Storage System across multiple databases,
enabling them to scale Web Storage System or make it more reliable by
removing the single point of failure.
ƒ Web Storage System fully integrates with Windows 2000 ACLs so that
administrators grant or deny permissions one time by using a single user
interface with which they're already familiar.

Taking Stock
1. How flexible is your company’s infrastructure and standards?
2. Would your company benefit by storing all knowledge sources in one
repository?
3. Does your company already use or is it planning to use Exchange
Server?
4. Does your company already use or is it planning to use Office family
products?
5. Have you identified the knowledge sources you want to put in Web
Storage System?
 6. Does your company have a development staff or a partner to extend
Web Storage System?
7. Will your company deploy Windows 2000 Server and Active Directory
so that it can take advantage of Web Storage System’s integration
with Windows 2000 security?
8. Will your company deploy Windows 2000 Professional so that users
can take advantage of offline folders in conjunction with Web Storage
System?
9. Have your company’s administrators received training for Windows
2000?
10. Is load balancing, clustering, or replication important to your company?
11. Do you want administrators to be able to maintain complete control
over usage for different groups of users, such as executives versus
other workers?

Action Plan
ƒ Identify the knowledge sources you want to put in Web Storage
System.
ƒ Order a copy of Exchange Server 2000 and ask your IT staff to
evaluate Web Storage System's position in your knowledge-
management solution. If you're already using an earlier version of
Exchange Server, start planning your upgrade.
ƒ Ask your IT staff to create a deployment plan for Windows 2000 and
make Windows 2000 training a priority for administrators and users.
ƒ Create a deployment plan that includes information about deploying
Web Storage System, moving knowledge sources into it, developing
applications for it, and training users how to use and rely on it.
ƒ Send key IT staff to deployment training for Windows 2000, Office
2000, and Exchange 2000 so that they'll be better able to plan. For
more information about training, see http://www.microsoft.com or
your Microsoft sales representative.

Chapter 9: Wireless Solutions

Overview
Wireless technology enables users to connect to your company’s knowledge-
management solution anytime, anywhere.

Recently, Microsoft changed its original vision, “A computer on every desk and in every
home running Microsoft software,” to a newer vision, “Connect anytime, anywhere.”
Read between the lines. This new vision means computers available all the time that
connect you to the information you need no matter where you happen to be. The new
millennium brings with it all of the exciting possibilities of ubiquitous computing and, true
to Microsoft’s form, the company will innovate in this arena like no other company can
do. This chapter describes some of Microsoft’s most exciting wireless innovations, most
of which arise from partnering with third-party companies. The chapter then relates to
you how that innovation affects your knowledge-management solutions in positive ways.
Microsoft’s new vision forces it to think out-of-the-box about how your company delivers
information. The most exciting results are wireless technologies that connect you to any
source of information, particularly your company’s knowledge-management portal,
without any type of cable. As those airline commercials say, “You are free to move about
the country.” According to Microsoft, your company won’t have to make significant
changes to integrate wireless technologies, as long as it sticks with Internet-based
standards. The devices that are available to your company vary from simple pagers and
mobile phones to handheld computers. The challenge that Microsoft and its partners
face is making these devices more intelligent and capable of talking to a network.
Currently most mobile devices are limited to receiving asynchronous, unidirectional 150-
character messages. But Microsoft plans to enable these devices to act like computers
with built-in modems so that they can connect to wireless networks. To that end,
Microsoft has developed technology called a microbrowser that allows users to view
Web content on mobile devices, similar to how some mobile phones already allow you to
do the same thing. You’ll become familiar with the microbrowser by its new name:
Microsoft Mobile Explorer.

Wireless technology is a reality, and you’ll see more of it as cellular providers develop
more data networks. Additionally, adapting Internet standards to wireless networks is a
key factor in the success of companies trying to provide knowledge workers with access
to any information anytime, anywhere. That’s the job of the Wireless Application Protocol
forum, which you also learn about in this chapter. As you read this chapter, don’t think for
a moment that these technologies are years down the road; far from it, wireless
technology will be a reality for your company within the next year. That’s why I suggest
that, after reading this chapter, you ask your IT department to start investigating how to
empower your knowledge workers with wireless technologies.

Industry Standards
Organizations such as IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), IEEE (Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) define
Internet protocols and data formats. These organizations receive very little credit for the
fact that they’ve laid the foundations on which the Internet is built. Their standards
revolutionized the telecommunications industry and are radically changing how
companies build networks and develop applications. Rather than invent protocols and
data formats specifically for wireless solutions, Microsoft is supporting wireless
technology using the Internet standards that these groups defined. In this vein, the
company is working with industry leadership to optimize existing protocols and data
formats for wireless solutions.

Extending existing standards to support wireless solutions, instead of inventing new

standards, is the best way to go. Wireless-only applications will be quite rare, according
to Microsoft. Wireless solutions will extend the reach of server-based applications;
therefore, companies must develop applications for both wired and wireless clients.
Doing this efficiently means that those companies must use a single suite of standards
and data formats to deliver seamless, interoperable applications for all clients and
servers. Microsoft is proactively participating in the key standards setting organizations
of the Internet. The goal of the company’s participation is to ensure that a single,
standard suite of Internet protocols and data representations are optimized for both
wireless and wired networks.
Contrasting Microsoft’s approach, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) forum is
working on a suite of wireless-specific protocols and application-development profiles.
(See the sidebar “Wireless Application Protocol Forum.”) The forum’s primary focus is
delivery of wireless data to cellular phones. Microsoft isn’t adopting this approach across
the board because it doesn’t use existing Internet standards to support broad ranges of
interactive pagers, smart phones, handheld computers, desktop computers, and so on.
The company will support WAP devices in its products, but Microsoft will also continue to
support and encourage the use of standards such as HTML (HyperText Markup
Language) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) at the application layer. What brings
Microsoft to the WAP table is the work that the organization is doing in the transport and
network layers to optimize wireless bandwidth.

Protocols

Microsoft is extending Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) to accommodate the

use of the following Internet standard protocols for wireless applications:
ƒ Header Conversion to negotiate sessions, track "session objects," and
compress HTTP headers.
 ƒ Content Conversion to convert content from XML to HTML, filter HTML,
and compress content based on the characteristics of a given client and
the network.
ƒ Push Features to implement new aspects of HTTP (HyperText Transfer
Protocol) that provide true push capability. This feature is particularly
important for wireless devices that provide paging-style message
delivery.

Data Formats

Examples of specific data formats that Microsoft is focusing on include the following:
ƒ vCard vCard is a data format for exchanging business-card information.
It defines a simple data format that describes how pieces of data (such
as parts of a name, a title, a company, a phone number, a fax address,
an e-mail address, a postal mail address, and so on) are exchanged on
the Internet.
ƒ iCal iCal is similar to vCard, but iCal is a data format for exchanging
calendar information. It uses a simple notation that Internet-based
applications use to exchange data about appointments, events, and so
on.
ƒ XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a recent W3C
recommendation that’s like HTML and SGML (Standard Generalized
Markup Language) in that it defines a language for tagging information.
XML is much more sophisticated than HTML or SGML because, rather
than simply tagging text data for output, it’s a general-purpose way to tag
any type of structured data. That makes XML a universal data format that
allows applications to appropriately search and render structured
information.

Wireless Application Protocol Forum

Recently, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) forum and the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) announced they were partnering to promote and define standards
for wireless devices on the Web. They made this announcement during a WAP forum
members meeting.

These two groups will define Web specifications that will enable wireless devices to
access the Web. These specifications include testing and implementation processes.
Also, they will promote these new specifications within the wireless industry. The
bottom line of this collaboration is to enable people to use their mobile devices,
particularly phones, to use data from the Internet and corporate intranets. The only
drawback to the technology is that the WAP forum is developing standards that require
special servers and administrators to control the content that is available to users. This
is in sharp contrast to Microsoft’s approach to wireless solutions, which relies on
existing Internet standards to provide full access to the Internet and corporate intranets.

Although Microsoft is watching this group closely, the company doesn’t buy into some
of its philosophies. The biggest difference is the development of wireless-specific
protocols. Microsoft believes that solutions must be network agnostic, allowing
companies to deliver solutions to both network-connected and wireless devices. Doing
so is best accomplished by extending existing Internet-based protocols for use by
wireless applications, not inventing new protocols. What has Microsoft’s attention is
WAP’s work in optimizing wireless throughput, a topic that promises to escalate over
the next year as wireless broadband solutions hit the horizon. Even though Microsoft
will continue to encourage the use of existing Internet protocols, it does plan to support
WAP in many of its products.
Wireless Carriers
Huge varieties of wireless services are already available, and many more are now on the
radar. Microsoft is partnering with wireless carriers to help them deploy wireless data
services. The company will offer carriers numerous professional services, such as
programs for integrating systems and certifying products. Microsoft plans to embark on a
three-phase effort that includes trials with leading carriers, operators, and manufacturers;
joint market development to build market awareness; and support of commercial
deployment activities in Europe, the United States, and Asia by taking active roles in
providing integration services. Microsoft will continue to seek new relationships with
carriers, equipment manufacturers, application developers, and content providers as it
identifies opportunities in wireless technology. Its joint venture with Qualcomm and
wirelessknowledge, LLC, is an example of the ventures that Microsoft is pursuing to
ensure that the marketplace for wireless data solutions is available to your company as
quickly as possible. For more information about this venture, see
http://www.wirelessknowledge.com.
Recently, Eric Schultz, chairman and CEO of wirelessknowledge, described how the
market will drive the wireless services that are available. According to Schultz, demand
is high for Short Message Service (SMS), which he equates to instant messaging for
mobile phones and pagers. However, demand for SMS is coming more from individuals
than from businesses. Business people will drive the next big demand for wireless
services. They want tools such as wireless mobile devices to become their multifunction
centers for communication. That means they want access to their e-mail, schedules, and
other applications over their mobile phones.
Business is driving demand for the third type of service: wireless network bandwidth. As
wireless bandwidth increases to 64K and beyond, businesses want to connect
knowledge workers to their intranets. The final stage, which the industry has just started,
is wireless connection of all of a business's devices to the Internet. The example that
Schultz cites is a demonstration of the NTT Docomo I-MODE service
(http://www.nttdocomo.com/), which uses existing Internet protocols to connect mobile
devices to the Internet.
Network services include the communication infrastructure that allows clients and
servers to connect with one another. In wireless configurations, only the last mile of the
communication path ending with the client is wireless, and it uses one of the many
available radio frequencies. The remainder of the network uses traditional networking
and telecommunications technologies. The first mile of the communication path,
beginning with the servers, is a LAN that your company operates or that a third-party
service provider operates on your company's behalf. Everything between the first and
last miles might be exclusively data networks, voice and data networks, or voice
networks carrying modulated data to a modem. Your wireless solution will undoubtedly
include partnerships with wireless service providers. A good place to start your search
for those providers is at Microsoft's ISN Web site, http://www.microsoft.com/isn.
Microsoft publishes this Web site for wireless service providers, and the case studies,
press releases, and other information on this site can quickly lead you to a service
provider that matches your requirements. Another source for locating service providers is
the Microsoft Certified Solution Provider (MCSP) program about which you learned in
this book's introduction.

Microsoft Products
For wireless solutions, Microsoft offers server products, client products, and
development tools. The company emphasizes its end-to-end support, providing one-stop
shopping for companies deploying new wireless solutions or upgrading existing
solutions. Customers can take advantage of Microsoft’s range of products that are
optimized for specific clients and servers. For example, Microsoft is pursuing varieties of
opportunities to build wireless data service centers, deliver Microsoft-branded content to
wireless subscribers, develop applications for wireless devices, assist companies
building wireless solutions, and partner with manufacturers to develop new wireless
devices.
The following Microsoft products are useful for building wireless solutions (you learn
more about how Microsoft products might fit into your wireless solutions in the following
sections):
Server Products ƒ Microsoft
Window
s 2000
Server
ƒ Microsoft
Internet
Informati
on
Server
(IIS)
ƒ Microsoft
BackOffi
ce
Server
Developer Tools ƒ Microsoft
FrontPa
ge
ƒ Microsoft
Visual
InterDev
ƒ Microsoft
Visual
Basic
ƒ Microsoft
Visual
C++
ƒ Microsoft
Visual
J++
Client Software ƒ Microsoft
Window
s 2000
Professi
onal
ƒ Microsoft
Window
s 98
ƒ Microsoft
Window
s CE
ƒ Microsoft
Outlook
2000
ƒ Microsoft
Internet
Explorer

Client Devices

Traditionally, client-server solutions include a user interface on a desktop computer and

an application hosted on a server. However, numerous microprocessor-equipped
devices capable of acting as clients are booming onto the scene. As these client devices
get smaller, they become mobile. This diversity of small mobile devices is making the
move to wireless networking inevitable. Client devices in wireless solutions range from
the ubiquitous laptop computers to handheld organizers to cellular phones. As devices
get smaller, less space is available on the screen, and I/O is simpler. Effective wireless
solutions must deliver applications and data to the entire spectrum of client devices.

As client devices get smaller, those built on Microsoft technologies have key attributes
that make them suitable for wireless solutions:
ƒ Instant On—All of the operating system software and core applica-tions
are protected in a read-only memory (ROM) chip. Immediate access to
applications and data gives these devices the convenience of paper.
ƒ Small Devices—Handheld computers are small, are lightweight, and
have tiny screens. Cellular phones are even smaller, are even lighter,
and can display even less content than handheld computers, typically
text only.
ƒ Long Battery Life—Windows CE supports more than 20 low-power
CPUs. The small size of the operating system, in conjunction with these
lower-power CPUs, enables these devices to conserve battery power. A
typical mobile device can last all day on a single charge.
ƒ Synchronization—Microsoft ActiveSync technology enables users to
keep data synchronized between their mobile devices and desktop
computers. This includes users' calendars, contact information, e-mail
messages, task lists, files, and databases.
ƒ Developer Support—Windows CE retains the key elements of the
Win32 Application Programming Interface (API). As a result, developers
can leverage their existing expertise to develop wireless applications for
Windows CE.
In support of client devices for wireless solutions, Microsoft is investing a lot of energy in
Windows CE. When properly implemented, this operating system and the tools that
come with it can be the heart and soul of any company’s wireless solution. For more
information about Windows CE, see the section “Windows CE” later in this chapter.

Data and Applications

Without access to users’ own data, wireless applications are no better than the news
broadcasts and stock quotes that pagers receive. Users want wireless access to their
information, which can include address books; a universal mailbox that contains e-mail
messages, faxes, and voice mail messages; task lists; personal calendars; and important
documents. Access to this type of information is essential to any personal digital
assistant. The ability to exchange e-mail, access the Internet, and connect to the
corporate intranet are essential to wireless solutions, too. It’s all about connecting
knowledge workers to knowledge sources where and when they need them.
Organizations can take advantage of wireless technology to move their knowledge
workers into the field, where they are most beneficial to the business, while fostering
anytime, anywhere work styles among their employees. To do so, organizations must
make their mission-critical data, applications, and processes available to remote and
mobile users. Organizational data includes structured data, such as customer databases,
price lists, corporate directories, inventory databases, and accounting data. It also
includes unstructured data, such as product data, project schedules, media libraries,
news archives, and so on. Beyond raw data itself are the automated business processes
and applications that provide useful access to these databases.

Microsoft provides software for a wide range of wireless client devices. Laptop
computers running Microsoft Windows 98 or Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional can
connect to server applications on a variety of networks. Microsoft Outlook 2000 connects
users to Microsoft Exchange servers. Internet Explorer is a client that connects to IIS and
other Web servers. Smaller client devices can use Windows CE and its suite of client
applications to connect to Exchange servers as well as Web servers. The obvious trade-
off between using laptop and handheld computers is that laptop computers can provide
richer access to your knowledge management solutions while handheld computers can
provide more convenient wireless access to the company’s sources of information.
To offset the trade-offs between each type of vehicle, many knowledge workers use both
types of devices. For example, field salespeople might use their wireless handheld
devices to quickly check their e-mail while taking a taxicab from the airport to their hotel.
At customers’ sites, however, they might use their laptop computers to connect
wirelessly to their companies’ product databases and ordering systems during their sales
calls. The night before big pitches, they might use their laptop computers to connect to
their knowledge portals and extract information that’s important to their presentations.
Then they could store important notes and excerpts on their handheld devices for
immediate access to the information. They use their laptop computers when they need
richer access to information, and they use their handheld devices when they need
quicker, immediate access to simpler forms of information.

Development Tools

As Microsoft is doing for industry standards, the company is extending its application
platform to wireless solutions instead of creating application platforms specific to the
wireless world. This approach allows companies to deploy existing applications to new
generations of wireless devices. It also allows companies to build wireless applications
using tools with which they’re already familiar and easily develop applications that work
in wired and wireless domains. To be fair, your company isn’t limited to using
development tools from Microsoft. Your developers can continue to use the tools in
which you’ve already invested significant chunks of your budget. Thus, companies can
quickly focus their existing development tools and talent on delivering applications and
services for wireless users.

For example, Hoechst Marion Roussel (HMR), an international pharmaceutical

manufacturer, has more than 1500 sales representatives who call on an average of 8 to
10 physicians every day. Because physicians are busy people, HMR representatives
estimate that they have anywhere from 45 seconds to 10 minutes with a physician to
present their products and leave samples. In searching for ways to speed up the
process, the company’s IS staff chose Windows CE-based handheld computers, as they
offered several advantages. One advantage was that Windows CE offers a number of
benefits from a developer’s perspective. Because it is based on the familiar Win32 API
and its development tools are extensions to the standard Win32 tools, it requires only a
short learning curve. Its enormous flexibility allowed HMR developers to meet very
specific requirements for speed, screen customization, and functionality. “Windows CE is
very close to the normal Win32 development platform, so it was a pretty small learning
curve,” notes developer Jamie Hohman.
Windows CE is the operating system on the handheld computers that many companies
choose for their wireless solutions, and it uses a subset of the same APIs that are in
Microsoft’s bigger 32-bit operating systems. The result is the developers are already
familiar with the libraries they need to create best-of-breed applications for wireless
devices running Windows CE. Windows CE extends devices that were designed to be
wired so they can support wireless connectivity. When developing applications that run
on Windows CE, developers can continue to use Microsoft tools, such as Visual C++,
Visual InterDev, and even their favorite text editor for editing HTML. Developers can also
continue to use FrontPage to prepare content for Windows CE. They must be aware of
the limitations in the devices’ Web browsers, however. For example, Mobile Explorer, the
microbrowser that Microsoft is developing for smart phones (see the section “Smart
Phones”), supports only a subset of HTML tags.

Server Products

Servers make data and applications available to client devices. They are more powerful
and more cost effective now than at any time in history. That trend will only continue as
Intel increases the power of its processors and as Microsoft continues the track it’s on
with Windows 2000 Server, the foundation for Micro-soft’s wireless solutions. Of
Microsoft’s operating systems for servers, Windows 2000 Server is the easiest to use,
and the company designed it for demanding businesses. It includes integrated
networking, application, and communication services. An essential part of Windows 2000
Server is Internet Information Server (IIS). IIS provides the ability to support Web-based
applications on the server and to deliver Web content to Web-based clients. IIS not only
supports the applications that provide access to live content and generate dynamic Web
pages, but it also includes an API that supports low-level plug-ins to extend the server in
new ways. Other key services in Windows 2000 Server include Index Server, Windows
Terminal Server, message queuing, and transaction processing.
For example, the IIS extensions you read about in the section “Protocols” are actually
extensions implemented as ISAPI components. (ISAPI is an interface that allows
programmers to develop extensions that work as a part of IIS.) Microsoft is developing
the Wireless Access Services as IIS filters, which allows third-party companies to extend
IIS by using established interfaces. Examples of other extensions to IIS include the
following:
ƒ Common user and device session management, as well as a common
session object that includes authentication, user preferences, and device
capabilities.
ƒ Session content generation. Some clients can parse XML while others
might require HTML. This extension provides the ability to auto- matically
produce the richest content the client can handle. It also includes the
ability to reformat HTML content for better represen- tation on the client.
ƒ Notification services with the capability to establish peer-to-peer push
channels.
ƒ Data synchronization services to synchronize information and data, such
as favorites, cookies, and other settings.
For more information about using Microsoft server products in your wireless knowledge-
management solutions, see Chapter 7, “Digital Dashboard,” and Chapter 8, “Exchange
Web Storage System.”

Windows CE
Microsoft Windows CE is an operating system that enables a broad range of handheld,
mobile devices. Windows CE is a 32-bit, multitasking, multithreaded operating system
that Microsoft built using proven design concepts found in other versions of Windows.
OEMs shipped the first products based on Windows CE, handheld computers, in 1996.
Windows CE is now available in a full range of products, including pocket PCs, digital
pagers, and cellular smart phones. You can even find Windows CE in a range of
consumer appliances, such as game consoles, DVD players, digital set-top boxes, and
so on. The most exciting development in Windows CE is its support for wireless solutions
and the new features in Windows CE 2.1. Windows CE 2.1 is the most recent version of
the mobile operating system; it enhances version 2, adding incremental changes to
existing features. It supports more types of hardware, has more database APIs, and
includes COM capabilities. These and other changes make it better resemble desktop
versions of Windows. For example, it supports cryptography, file systems and thread
handling, and localization.

Examples of how your company can use wireless devices running Windows CE include
the following:
ƒ Sales Force Automation—Expecting to save approximately $5 million
annually, Hoechst Marion Roussel, a global pharmaceutical company,
equipped its sales representatives with handheld PCs. Representatives can
now quickly capture sample-drug distribution details, including physicians'
signatures, and exchange customer back-ground and sales information
with the company's headquarters.
ƒ Reliable Two-Way Messaging—Goldman Sachs uses Windows CE-based
devices to keep track of current information about the market for particular
securities. The company's IT organization developed an application that
connects the wireless infrastructure of the New York Stock Exchange to
Goldman Sachs' existing trading systems.
ƒ Secure Wireless Communication—Paradigm4, a Microsoft Solution
Provider, developed an application for the Pittsburgh Police Department
 that provides secure access to data officers need while they're on patrol.
This data includes the city's warrant information, the state's vehicle
registrations and driver licenses, and national crime databases.
ƒ Geographic Information Systems—The U.S. Marines use hand-held
devices to extend their Command and Control system, communicating
orders as well as geographic information about enemy positions.

Snyder Healthcare Sales’s clients are some of the biggest names in the pharmaceutical
industry. The company recognized the need for digital systems that are faster and more
accurate than its aging and inefficient paper-based sales system. After plenty of soul
searching, the company decided to use handheld computers based on Windows CE,
along with a custom application to automate the paper-based processes its sales force
had been using. The company, which started deployment in the summer of 1998, is
reaping benefits by delivering accurate data to clients much faster than before.
According to Snyder, the accuracy rate for sales data collected on behalf of its
customers has jumped to 100 percent, up from 85 to 90 percent with its paper-based
processes. The time it takes Snyder to provide reports to its clients has dropped from 60
days or longer after a sales call to just 10 days. “The bottom line is that we can provide
far better service to our customers, which lets them make decisions faster and gives us
an edge on our competition,” says Tom Pollock, senior director of information systems at
Snyder. “By moving to the Windows CE-based technology, we’ve eliminated a lot of
internal headaches that we had using paper.”

Bluetooth

On the forefront of wireless technology is Bluetooth. At COMDEX in the fall of 1999,

Bluetooth stole the show by introducing technology that enables low-cost wireless
communications and networking. Within Blue-tooth’s domain are portable and desktop
computers; mobile phones and pagers; and a whole host of connected devices that we
don’t even know about yet.

Bluetooth created the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) to deliver products based
on Bluetooth technologies. It includes several companies, and Microsoft is prominently
featured in that list. Microsoft’s interest in Bluetooth is to further its vision of connecting
users to their data anytime, anywhere. Microsoft is evaluating Bluetooth technology as
part of its long-term strategy for building what Microsoft calls personal area networks.
Part of its attraction includes ad hoc networking, support of Universal Plug and Play,
and so on. Microsoft expects that participating in these innovations will expand its
ability to ship new wireless solutions to users.

Microsoft’s role in the Bluetooth SIG is not as an adopter. Microsoft is participating as a

promoter, which means that the company will work with industry leaders to promote the
technology. The company will actively participate in working groups and provide
marketing, public relations, and regulatory help.

Mobile Explorer
The cellular smart phone and digital pager are emerging client devices that Microsoft is
targeting for Windows CE. These low-end devices don’t have enough resources to run
generic applications, but they do have software-driven user interfaces, displays, and
sufficient input capabilities to make them capable of providing wireless access to data.
To enable these devices to connect knowledge workers to the information they need,
anytime, anywhere, Microsoft is developing the microbrowser and defining a lightweight
client architecture based on it. This will support all the protocols and data types
described in this chapter, making it a universal, wireless-optimized client for Web
applications.
The microbrowser is independent of any operating system. It uses an Operating System
Abstraction Layer to hide operating-system details. When the microbrowser calls an
operating-system service, it uses one of the abstraction layer’s well-defined APIs instead
of calling the operating system directly; the microbrowser filters all operating-system
access through this abstraction layer. This approach, which is similar to Windows 2000’s
hardware-abstraction layer, allows OEMs to port the microbrowser to different operating
systems by simply creating an abstraction layer for the different system. As part of the
Wireless Product Adaptation Kit (WPAK), Microsoft is also making the microbrowser’s
source code available to OEMs to enable open solutions. The WPAK contains the
following:
ƒ Source code for the Windows CE microbrowser
ƒ Customizable code for the user interface
ƒ Details about the Operating System Abstraction Layer
ƒ Sample code, libraries, and documentation
Microbrowser technology is compatible with the full range of Internet standards. It
supports HTTP 1.1, HTML 3.2, and telephone integration using the tel: protocol
designator for URLs. It has a well-defined event model that it expresses through XML
and includes a real-time notification engine. The Operating System Abstraction Layer
includes APIs for security, networking, storage, memory management, display, input,
and telephony control. The storage API is an abstraction layer, which can map to a local
store or the server, depending on the capability of the device. Capabilities for
synchronizing information and data in the local store with that on the server is provided
through standard formats, including vCard and iCal.

You’ll recognize microbrowser technology in its current incarnation as Microsoft Mobile

Explorer. This is a platform for mobile phones that enables secure access to corporate
data, e-mail, the Internet, and electronic-commerce applications from feature and smart
phones. Knowledge workers can have access to the information they need, anytime,
anywhere. You learn more about Mobile Explorer in the following sections.

Feature Phones

Mobile Explorer for feature phones is a wireless-telephone browser solution capable of

running networked applications. It gives mobile users quick and easy access to e-mail
messages, calendar data, contact information, voice-mail messages, and the Internet
while connected to their Internet service providers or carriers/operators.
Mobile Explorer for feature phones is operating-system independent and works on any
wireless network. This microbrowser supports HTML-standard Web content as well as
Wireless Markup Language (WML), which complies with the Wireless Applications
Protocol (WAP) version 1.1. Mobile Explorer provides a global standard for Internet
access through handheld devices such as cellular phones. By supporting both of these
standards, Mobile Explorer for feature phones lets carriers offer a choice of content and
services to their customers, and it gives users a great online experience. It allows these
companies to offer their customers a browser that supports graphics, cookies, favorites,
and forms. The browser also links to phone-specific applications so that users can dial
phone numbers directly from a Web site (if the site uses the tel: protocol designator for
URLs).

The first version of Mobile Explorer for feature phones is currently in carrier trials.
Microsoft is scheduled to make version 2 available by the second quarter of 2000. This
version will include additional support for robust and secure corporate access, e-mail,
personal information access, as well as dual mode HTML and WAP 1.1-based Internet
access.

Smart Phones

Mobile Explorer for smart phones is a mobile phone solution that runs both networked
and local software. Based on the application-rich Windows CE operating system, Mobile
Explorer for smart phones gives mobile phone users a high-resolution display and
access to a suite of local applications, including their calendars, contact software, task
lists, a graphical Web browser, and a media player. With a cellular phone based on
Mobile Explorer for smart phones, knowledge workers can conduct many of the same
tasks they perform at a desktop PC; these tasks include reading and replying to e-mail
and voice-mail messages, using contact lists to manage calls and customer visits,
reviewing tasks and notes, and browsing the Web.

Mobile Explorer for smart phones includes an Inbox application for managing written
communication and a utility for managing voice-mail messages. This lets a user easily
manage both e-mail and SMS messages. Phones sporting Mobile Explorer for smart
phones also support advanced voice-communication features, such as integration with
personal data when sending and receiving calls. Mobile Explorer for smart phones also
provides a graphical Web browser, with Web content displayed on a high-resolution color
screen. This enables customers to easily navigate links, select services, and enter URLs.
The secure Web browser will also enable e-commerce and other transaction-based
services.

Because it runs applications locally and over a network, Mobile Explorer for smart
phones will let knowledge workers stay connected to their data, anytime, anywhere.
Synchronization is automatic and seamless, so the mobile phone reflects the current
state of the users’ data. They can instantly access up-to-date information while offline
from their wireless services. Alternatively they can remain connected to their data, with
the wireless data link offering a continuous communication channel to the customer’s
data sources.

Carrier trials of Mobile Explorer for smart phones have already started. Microsoft is
scheduled to release it to OEMs by the middle of 2000.

Wrap Up
A key technology that enables knowledge workers to access the information they need
anytime, anywhere is wireless connectivity. Exciting, new wireless technologies are
making their ways on to the radar screen, some from Microsoft and some from third-
party companies.
ƒ Rather than inventing wireless standards, Microsoft intends to work with
standards bodies to enhance existing standards for use with wireless
networks.
ƒ The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) forum is defining wireless specific
standards for delivering content to wireless devices, but this technology
does not integrate well with companies' existing infrastructure.
ƒ Microsoft is expanding Internet Information Server (IIS) for wireless
applications. The company is also targeting data formats such as XML in its
products.
ƒ Wireless-service providers are ramping up broad ranges of services that are
useful for any company's knowledge-management solution, ranging from
Short Message Service (SMS) to broadband wireless service.
ƒ Client devices suitable for wireless solutions have the following
characteristics: they turn on instantly, they are very small units, they have
extended battery life, they synchronize with users' network data, and they
allow developers to leverage their existing knowledge on a platform for
wireless computing.
ƒ Developing applications for Windows CE requires the same know-ledge as
does developing for other 32-bit versions of Windows, allowing developers
to use tools and APIs with which they are already familiar.
ƒ Windows CE is the heart and soul of Microsoft's wireless initiatives. Variations
of Windows CE, such as Mobile Explorer for smart phones, enable a full
range of wireless solutions on devices such as digital pagers and cellular
phones.
Taking Stock
1. Would your company's knowledge workers benefit from wireless
access to information?
2. Are laptop computers a suitable client device for your company's
wireless users?
3. Are handheld computers based on Windows CE a suitable client
device for your company's wireless users?
4. Are mobile phones based on Mobile Explorer the best client device for
your company's wireless users?
5. Will you use wireless devices as they are out of the box or will your
com–pany require them to be customized by your IT department or a
third party?
6. Is your IT department able to develop wireless applications?
7. Does your infrastructure use Internet standards? If not, is your IT
department prepared to deploy Internet standards such as TCP/IP?
8. What does your company hope to accomplish with its wireless
solution? Access to a knowledge-management portal? E-mail?
Internet access? Calendaring?
9. Of the knowledge sources that your company has identified, which of
these sources do you want to deliver to wireless users in the field?
10. If your company doesn't use Microsoft server products, is your current
vendor focusing on your need for wireless solutions in its product
development plan?
11. Have you identified a service provider for wireless access to your
intranet?

Action Plan
ƒ Make sure that you can communicate to your IT department an overall
vision for how your wireless solutions must fit with your knowledge-
management strategies.
ƒ Deploy server products that use Internet standards and that can take
advantage of wireless technologies as they develop.
ƒ Choose a wireless service provider that can connect wireless client
devices to your network. See http://www.microsoft.com/isn for help
making this choice.
ƒ Select the types of wireless client devices your company will use and
the groups of users to which you will deploy each type of device.
ƒ Develop the wireless applications your company wants to deploy. An
example is a knowledge-management portal designed for wire- less
clients.
ƒ Pilot your wireless devices and applications with a cross section of
users.
ƒ Deploy the company's wireless devices to the appropriate groups of
users, and train them appropriately. Many users will require no
training at all.

Chapter 10: Intelligent Interfaces

Overview
Microsoft is developing intelligent interfaces that will change the way users interact with
their computers; keyboards just might be a thing of the past.

So far in this book, you've read about Microsoft's more substantive knowledge-
management initiatives, including Digital Dashboard and Microsoft Exchange Web
Storage System. Microsoft's most recent initiative is further thinking. According to Rich
Tong, vice president of the Business Productivity Group at Microsoft, the company is
betting that "we can significantly change the way people interact with computers." The
company is making big investments in speech technology, natural language processing,
and more. You don't see the full scope of this technology on your desktop today, but
major breakthroughs are on the radar screen. Microsoft recently transferred a large part
of its research group to its product groups, which is a "symbol of what we expect will
happen," according to Tong.

This chapter briefly describes key areas that Microsoft is researching. The company
does not guarantee that it will deliver all of these technologies. And, as this technology
reaches further into the future than Microsoft's other initiatives, many details are missing.
Regardless, intelligent interfaces promise to make computing resources more accessible
and more convenient for all knowledge workers, and this chapter gives you a sneak
peak. All of the case studies you've seen in this book have one theme in common: easy-
to-use, standard user interfaces are key ingredients in any knowledge-management
solution. Intelligent interfaces will make already effective knowledge portals even easier
to use. Intelligent interfaces allow knowledge workers to interact with computers in
natural, human ways, rather than using paradigms forced on them by years of computing
baggage.

User Interfaces
Microsoft is exploring varieties of three-dimensional user interfaces that help users
visualize information in new ways. The company is looking for new ways to help users
navigate and ways to provide more information space on a small desktop. Microsoft is
researching methods for replacing the current two-dimensional desktops with three-
dimensional desktops, for example, which are more interesting and allow users to
display more information in a similar area.

The following are a couple of examples of what Microsoft is researching, and you can
find more information about these topics in the following sections:
ƒ Persona Conversational assistants that help users complete tasks.
ƒ Task Gallery Extensions of the desktop metaphor that turn the screen into a
room in which users work. Along the walls of the room, which is a gallery,
users see paintings that represent different tasks.

Persona
Microsoft Research's Persona project is researching technologies that create
conversational assistants: lifelike animated characters that interact with users using
natural spoken dialogue. It uses the Whisper speaker-independent continuous speech-
recognition system and a broad-coverage English understanding system, which you
learn about later in this chapter. In Microsoft's initial prototype, which you might have
seen in some of the company's television commercials, an expressive three-dimensional
parrot named Peedy responds to users' requests for music. For example, when a user
asks Peedy, What albums do you have from Madonna? it scans through its database
(see the section "Data Retrieval" later in this chapter) and responds, "I have The
Immaculate Collection from 1990." Also, Peedy uses humanlike mannerisms to express
itself. For example, if Peedy doesn't understand a user's request, it might raise its wing
to its ear and ask, What? Additionally, varieties of sound effects and cinematic camera
techniques support the conversation.

TaskGallery

Microsoft Windows' current user interface uses the familiar metaphor of a desktop to
help users organize their work. The desktop was a major breakthrough when it first
replaced the MS-DOS command-line prompt some two decades ago, making computers
accessible to more people. Now, Microsoft believes that the time has come for the
company to start working on the next step forward, which it believes will help users deal
with the ever-increasing amount of information they must manage every day.
Microsoft's TaskGallery is a three-dimensional user interface that expands the electronic
desktop into an entire office with an unlimited number of desktops. (Think virtual
desktops with a three-dimensional twist.) The screen becomes a three-dimensional
gallery with paintings hanging on the walls, with each painting a representation of a
different task. Users move quickly from one task to another using the mouse or the
keyboard. Microsoft Research is trying to relate the illusion to lessons that children learn
about physical space so that users get the system intuitively without having to learn or
adjust to it. Placement of tasks in TaskGallery takes advantage of users' spatial memory;
the active task takes center stage on a platform at the end of the room, and other tasks
are in the periphery. Users can arrange tasks any way they want, and the system will
remember the tasks' organization. Users quickly switch between any task using the
mouse or the keyboard.

Speech Recognition
For some users, speech recognition is the best way to interact with computers. And,
according to Microsoft, speech recognition promises to be the dominant human-
computer interface in the near future. Microsoft quotes Gartner Group's prediction that
speech recognition will be integrated into mainstream operating systems by 2002, for
example. Deloitte & Touche Consulting surveyed more than a thousand chief executives
in health care organizations. Of those polled, 40 percent plan to use speech recognition
within the next two years. Even though you might have heard a lot of negative spin about
speech recognition, particularly from technology reviewers, the technology is advancing
at a rapid pace. Microsoft's $45 million investment in Lernout and Hauspie,
(http://www.lhs.com) a leader in speech-recognition technology, is an indication of
Microsoft's commitment to build speech recognition into the company's products.

Most users are familiar with speech-recognition applications based on dictation

grammars, also known as continuous speech recognition, or have at the very least read
one of the many negative reviews of this technology. It requires large commitments from
users, who have to spend time training the speech-recognition engine and learning to
speak in a consistent drone to assure a high degree of accuracy. Most users won't
commit enough time and energy to the process and don't use the technology
successfully as a result. Instead, users want to sit down and start using a product without
having to train it or themselves. Other forms of speech recognition are eliminating the
need for training, however.

Look for two kinds of speech recognition to appear in Microsoft products over the next
few years:
ƒ Dictation This type of speech recognition allows users to speak continuously
while the computer converts their spoken words into text. For example, a
lawyer might use speech recognition to create a letter without using a
keyboard.
ƒ Command and Control This type of speech recognition allows users to issue
commands using speech, rather than a keyboard and mouse. An example
is a user telling a word processor to delete a sentence by saying, Delete
the last sentence.
Microsoft is proactively refining its Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI)
and is making it available to developers wanting to speech-
enable their applications. Speech recognition is also showing itself in Microsoft
applications. The most notable is Microsoft Encarta, the company's world-class
encyclopedia. Users can search for articles by using plain English, spoken queries such
as, What city is the capital of Texas? Auto PC is another Microsoft product that uses
speech recognition to give users hands-free access to information. As users drive their
cars, they can ask for directions, check their e-mail, or change radio channels by issuing
spoken commands rather than taking their hands off of the steering wheel. For more
information, see Microsoft's Intelligent Interface Technologies site,
http://www.microsoft.com/iit.
 Text-to-Speech
Text-to-speech is a process through which text is rendered as digital audio and then
spoken by the computer. Text-to-speech is most appropriate in two scenarios in which
audio files are not feasible: an audio file is too large to store on disk or creating an audio
file is impossible because its contents are not known ahead of time. Practical uses for
text-to-speech that Microsoft identifies include the following:
ƒ Reading Dynamic Text Text-to-speech is useful for phrases that vary too
much to record. Speaking the time is a good example in which storing all
the possible combinations of time is impractical.
ƒ Proofreading Audibly proofreading text and numbers helps users catch typing
errors missed by visual proofreading (it's a fresh set of ears) for
proofreading.
ƒ Conserving Storage Space Text-to-speech is useful for phrases that would
occupy too much storage space if they were prerecorded in digital-audio
format.
ƒ Notifying the User of Events Text-to-speech is useful for informational
messages. Narrator, which comes with Microsoft Windows 2000, is a good
example of a feature that helps people with visual disabilities better
navigate. To inform users that print jobs are complete, for example,
applications can say "Printing complete" rather than displaying a message
and requiring users to click OK.
ƒ Providing Audible Feedback Text-to-speech can provide audible feedback
when visual feedback is inadequate or difficult. For example, users' eyes
might be busy with other tasks, such as transcribing data from a paper
document. Users who have poor vision might rely on text-to-speech for
feedback.

Text-to-speech is nothing new, but Microsoft's innovations make the results more
natural. The company's new text-to-speech engine includes new and better voices
(female, male, and robotic), and it handles text normalization better, making the results
sound a bit more normal. You can sample Microsoft's text-to-speech engine in Windows
2000 using Narrator, which is the accessibility tool that reads text to users who have
visual disabilities. Look for additional Microsoft tools, including Internet Explorer, to
support text-to-speech in the future.

Data Retrieval
Microsoft SQL Server 7 includes a feature that is important to building intelligent
interfaces, one that integrates with other Microsoft initiatives, such as speech
recognition, to allow users to find information using natural spoken language. The feature
is English Query. It allows users to retrieve data from a database by asking questions in
plain English. Figure 10-1 on the following page shows how English Query interacts with
applications and SQL Server 7. As shown, users ask a plain-English question such as,
"Who lives in Boston?" and the English Query Engine uses the English Query
Application's knowledge about the database and its semantics to generate the SQL
statement. The client application can then use the SQL statement to query the database
and retrieve the results for the user.

Figure 10-1: English Query.

Without speech recognition, users must type their queries, but with speech recognition,
they can search using spoken words. By using English Query and speech recognition
together, developers can provide users the ability to ask questions about a data source
almost as naturally as they would ask another person. This provides a distinct advantage
for supporting visually impaired users, users who suffer from repetitive motion disorders,
and users with other disabilities.

Wrap Up
Microsoft's intelligent interface initiatives will make computers easier to use for all
knowledge workers, eventually eliminating the requirement for keyboards and pointing
devices. The result will be smaller, more portable devices that knowledge workers can
use on the go and control with the spoken word. The initiatives you read about in this
chapter include the following:
ƒ Microsoft is investigating new user interfaces for computers that include
animated assistants and three-dimensional spaces in which users can
organize their tasks.
ƒ Speech recognition promises to make computers easier to use, because
users can interact with the computer in more natural ways than using a
keyboard. Speech recognition is particularly important for the future of
handheld devices, as these devices won't have keyboards as they become
smaller and more generic.
ƒ Text-to-speech provides an alternative way for users to absorb information, by
hearing it read aloud. For example, users can listen to their e-mail rather
than reading it.
ƒ SQL Server 7's English Query and speech recognition make an exciting
combination that allows users to search for information using spoken
requests such as, What is the company's best-selling product today?

Taking Stock
1. Is your IT department ready for new advances when they become
available?
2. How open is your organization to technology advances such as three-
dimensional desktops, animated assistants, and speech recognition?
3. Is your IT department proactively tracking initiatives such as speech
recognition and natural language processing?
4. In what ways can you envision your organization using intelligent
interfaces?

Action Plan
ƒ List and prioritize the types of human-computer interactions that you
can improve using the intelligent interfaces you learned about in this
chapter.
ƒ Keep current with the latest intelligent interface technology by
frequenting Microsoft's Web site, http://www.microsoft.com/iit..

Part IV: Appendix

Chapter List
Appendix: Technology Roadmap

Appendix: Technology Roadmap

Overview
This appendix is a technology roadmap that helps you evaluate and build a
comprehensive knowledge-management solution. Not only does it help you identify a
knowledge-management solution's modules, but it also helps you evaluate the
successful implementation of each module. This appendix is not a development plan or
 design. Read it with the intention of learning how a typical knowledge-management
solution built with Microsoft products might look in your organization. Read it so that you
can better communicate with your IT organization and communicate your requirements
to them.

When Microsoft developed this roadmap, it faced several challenges. Knowledge

management was and is still not well understood from a technological or an
organizational standpoint. Also, the industry doesn't have a commonly accepted
definition of knowledge-management features, with the exception of collaboration,
workflow, and automating information flow such as e-mail. As a result, this isn't an
academic approach to knowledge management such as you'll find in many textbooks. It's
a pragmatic approach to understanding the technology in a typical knowledge-
management system in the real world.

Enabling Modules
For each business problem in a company, knowledge management evolves through
choosing the right technologies depending on the problems that the company needs to
solve. Each company has its own characteristics based on organizational processes and
technologies. This appendix describes each of the modules, shown in Figure A-1, of
knowledge management and defines the organizational requirements and technologies
that need to be implemented to enable an infrastructure with knowledge-management
services.

Figure A-1: Knowledge-management modules.

Two modules are prerequisites. An intranet and a messaging system form the foundation
of any knowledge-management system, and they constitute an infrastructure that
supports the efficient transport, structure, access, and collaborative management of
electronic data. The remaining enabling modules extend that basic infrastructure to a
sophisticated knowledge-management system that includes services like Content
Management, variations of Information Delivery, and Data Analysis. Automated services
such as Data Tracking and Workflow Processes are also included as part of the
Community and Team modules.

The implementation of the enabling modules has a true plug-and-play character.

Although some of the modules profit from the implementation of a previous module, they
can be added in any order related to the specific business need that you're trying to
meet. For example, Real-Time Collaboration services, such as video conferencing, can
be easily included on top of the prerequisite technologies, but they are enhanced by the
Metadata services provided in the Content Management Module.

Microsoft's KM Platform
The knowledge-management platform's modules provide great knowledge-management
systems with broad support. The knowledge-management platform offers a typical, but
extended, three-layered architecture that allows your company to build a flexible,
 powerful, and scaleable knowledge-management solution. Figure A-2 shows these three
layers, and the following list describes them in more detail:
ƒ The Knowledge Desktop layer consists of familiar productivity tools, such
as Microsoft Office, and integrates tightly with the Knowledge Services
layer.
ƒ The Knowledge Services layer provides important knowledge-
management services such as collaboration, document management,
and search and deliver functionality, with modules for Tracking,
Workflow, and Data Analysis.
ƒ The System layer is a foundation that includes administration, security,
and directories for managing the knowledge-management platform. All
services run on the System layer and benefit from the integrated
communication services that connect with external solutions, platforms,
and partners.

Figure A-2: Layers of a knowledge-management platform.

The Microsoft knowledge-management platform relies on the Microsoft BackOffice family
of products, which provide the services you need to build the knowledge-management
prerequisites (messaging and collaboration and complete intranet) and to extend those
prerequisites into knowledge-management solutions by implementing all five knowledge-
management enabling modules (Content Management, Communities and Teams,
Portals and Search, Data Analysis, and Real-Time Collaboration). Besides these
services, BackOffice provides interfaces for connecting to and integrating with legacy
information or knowledge sources, such as RDBMS systems, SNA data sources, or
knowledge-management enabling technologies such as Lotus Notes or Lotus Domino.
Figure A-3 illustrates how Microsoft technologies map to the layers of the knowledge-
management platform you saw in Figure A-2.

One of the great advantages of BackOffice is the ability to migrate its services from a
single server or to multiple servers without experiencing a major change in services or
security aspects. This provides a platform that is scalable without the need for changes
in the solutions that run on top of BackOffice. This ability is especially relevant to
departmental server solutions where Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino provide a common
groupware platform. There, BackOffice extends the departmental groupware
functionalities with its integrated and scaleable knowledge-management services. This
makes it easy to set up departmental solutions with the Microsoft BackOffice platform,
and you can extend or connect them later to enterprise-integrated solutions.
Figure A-3: Microsoft knowledge-management architecture.

Basic Conditions for KM

Two conditions must be met to successfully implement a knowledge-management

system:
ƒ Knowledge workers must be prepared to work with technology and to
document their work.
ƒ Knowledge-management systems must support an easy way to create,
store, and retrieve information from those workers.
The success of a knowledge-management system depends on the culture of a company
supporting the efforts of its people to produce information that can be used to improve
the business. Empowered staff producing high-value content will get more use and
benefit from a knowledge-management system than will people in companies that don't
support sharing of information and ideas in an open fashion. This benefit is even greater
for those companies that have expensive human resources or that operate in industries
that depend on sharing and reusing information. Chapter 2, "Organizational Barriers",
describes ways to help your company overcome cultural barriers such as these. The
chances of finding a knowledge-management system (or candidates for a potential one)
are extremely high in the following types of companies:
ƒ Companies with huge R&D efforts (such as those in the computer
industry)
ƒ Companies with big engineering departments (such as manufacturers)
ƒ Companies that rely on documentation (such as those in the phar-
maceutical and medical industries)
ƒ Technology consulting companies, software-engineering companies,
ISVs
ƒ Accounting and consulting firms

Knowledge-management infrastructures also need to support the capturing of

undocumented information (human thought), the sharing of ideas and documents, and
the efficient finding of this information (quickly and, more importantly, accurately). This is
the foundation of a knowledge-management system that helps to handle information and
transfer it into knowledge.

Another characteristic of a system that supports knowledge-management efforts is the

existence of a set of common tools used and well known by all users of the system.
Tools that provide an entry point to this system either present information or control all
interaction with the system. They therefore must be capable of handling all the
information that is part of the environment of the knowledge worker. In the best case,
only one tool or application should exist for this interface.
 Messaging and Collaboration
The entry point to all information and applications in a knowledge-management system is
also called a portal (see Figure A-4). If the environment also supports creating content,
it's a knowledge-management desktop. Web browsers, which can present all kinds of
information in a rich way, are ideal candidates for such functionality. Portal Services are
covered within the "Portals and Search" section, which focuses on content creation,
sharing, and collaboration.

Figure A-4: Sharing information.

The goal of the messaging and collaboration module is to create a basic, collaborative
knowledge-management system that supports sharing and reusing information. To
support the requirement of capturing undocumented knowledge, the Messaging and
Collaboration module is a perfect tool. If writing e-mail, sending documents, or
participating in discussions are easy tasks for knowledge workers, the motivation to act
with knowledge management in mind is much higher than in infrastructures that don't
support this or that make it hard to use collaborative features. In a well-designed
collaborative environment, this knowledge flow can be easily captured in e-mail, stored in
document and discussion databases, and archived in the knowledge-management
system for later reuse.

Technology Requirements

The following list describes the technology requirements for messaging and collaboration
at each layer: desktop, services, and system:
Desktop ƒ Easy-to-use
productivity
suites
integrated in
all other
desktop
services
ƒ Comfortable
e-mail
systems that
support
collaborative
services
such as
shared
calendars,
task lists,
contact lists,
and team-
based
 discussions
ƒ Web browser
for browsing
and
presenting
the
documents
to the user
ƒ Simple
search
functionalitie
s such as
file services
integrated
with the
operating
system or
search
services
integrated
with an
application
(e-mail,
discussions)
Services ƒ Collaboration
services with
a multi-
purpose
database for
capturing
the
collaborative
data
ƒ Web
services for
providing the
access layer
to
documented
knowledge
ƒ Indexing
services for
full-text
search of
documents
System ƒ Well-
organized
central-
storage
locations
such as file,
Web
servers, and
document
databases
 Microsoft Technologies
Figure A-5 shows the three knowledge-management platform layers-system, services,
and desktop-configured for messaging and collaboration. The following list is an
overview of the functions of each part:
ƒ Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook Helps you build the basic
front-end for the end-users of the knowledge-management system for
creating, capturing, and organizing their information sources for effective
working. For knowledge-management services, Microsoft Windows and
Microsoft Office provide basic search services for documents, while the
Microsoft Outlook search services find information in e-mail and
discussion threads.
ƒ Microsoft Internet Explorer Provides easy access and browsing for all
kinds of information. Internet Explorer integrates with Microsoft Office
and also allows access to all Microsoft Office documents.
ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Server Stores documents in its Secure File
Server.
ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server Adds e-mail, collaboration, discussion, and
document-management features.
ƒ Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) with Microsoft Index
Server Provides basic search and access of documents in file systems
over standard Internet protocols.

Figure A-5: Microsoft integration in a collaborative environment.

The technology enablers in this module are sophisticated e-mail and Web services. Both
services must be extensible and customizable to work with the index services in Index
Server (for full-text search) or discussion services in Exchange and Office 2000 (for
threaded or inline discussions). Equally important are the interfaces with the desktop
productivity suite to deliver the collaborative scenario. The following list describes how
these Microsoft products satisfy the requirements you learned about in the previous
section:

Knowledge Creation and Collaboration (Rich E-Mail, Shared Calendar, Tasks,

Contacts, Journals)
ƒ Office 2000 E-mail, send or store rich Office documents (Access data
pages, for example); share common contacts and team calendars;
activity tracking in journals.
ƒ Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows
NT Workstation Access to heterogeneous knowledge documents with
integrated Microsoft Internet Explorer.
ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server Access to knowledge documents with
standard Internet protocols like IMAP/NNTP/HTTP or via MAPI (Microsoft
Outlook client).

Basic Knowledge Find Services

ƒ Office 2000 Exchange database search (threaded discussions, e-mail)
with Outlook 2000; possibility to save regular searches in Exchange
Public Folder for later reuse.
 ƒ Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows
NT Workstation File based document search; possibility to save regular
searches on knowledge-management desktop or include links to those in
Web pages.
ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Server Microsoft Index Server for full text
search of documents on file servers.
ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server Rich Views (grouping, sorting, filtering) on
Exchange Public Folders.

Knowledge Storage
ƒ Office 2000 E-mail and posts to Exchange database (Exchange Public
Folders) for later reuse; save to central file server location.
ƒ Microsoft Windows NT Server Secure file server services and
Microsoft Internet Information Server for accessing the stored documents
over standard Internet protocols.
ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server Multi-purpose database for storing e-mail,
news posts, Office documents.

Scenarios and Recommendations

Use Web technologies to access information. One goal of a knowledge-management
system is to build a single interface for its users, where as much information as possible
is accessible. To achieve that single interface, use Web technologies, especially HTTP
and HTML to present information. This will give the most flexibility when accessing data
from the knowledge-management desktop. Related recommendations include:
ƒ Use Internet Information Server and HTTP as the primary application-
level protocol to hide the document store (file system).
ƒ Use Index Server for full-text search of the documents stored on file
servers. Customize Index Server to search different document partitions
to reflect the scope of the company's information.
ƒ Use Internet Explorer as an information broker.
Use the e-mail client and integrate it with the productivity suite. The e-mail client with
collaborative features (such as calendaring, task management, and discussion threads)
is one of the first applications with which users familiarize themselves. Integrate the
productivity suite into this application to build a single interface for accessing
collaborative information and creating documents. Train users to utilize the Microsoft
Outlook messaging and collaboration client out-of-the box integration into the Microsoft
Office suite as the primary entry point for collaborative data and corporate document
manipulations.
Use the collaboration server to store knowledge assets. With rich, e-mail services
integrated with the productivity suite among knowledge workers, the databases on
collaboration servers are an important knowledge source. Build a business-related
strategy for deploying Microsoft Exchange Public Folders to store discussions and
collaborative documents. Enable key Public Folders for e-mail to enhance the support of
the knowledge assets captured by Office 2000.

Complete Intranet
The goal of a complete intranet is to enable knowledge workers to find the right
information to solve problems or drive decisions. This core module of knowledge
management is supported by a well-organized information network that drives decision
making or provides access to all the relevant data needed to get a job done. These
decisions must be made quickly enough to get or maintain a competitive advantage. A
collaborative environment must be extended if it is to meet these requirements because
otherwise it is still too hard for its users to access accurate information, gather all the
relevant information, and find hints to other knowledge sources.

A knowledge librarian and an appropriate infrastructure are keys to success:

ƒ From an organizational perspective, there must be a role that knows which
organizational group or team needs what kind of knowledge, where
 information inside and outside a company is located, and how to group and
link information together.
ƒ From an infrastructure perspective, services are needed that support the core
characteristics of intranets, such as presenting related information in the
form of pointers and links to Web resources, creating and accessing
knowledge assets over standard Internet protocols, presenting the right
information (groups) to the right people.

The knowledge architect (KA) is introduced during the transition to a complete intranet.
The role of the KA is to own the technical and political overview of the information
infrastructure of the organization. This role negotiates between groups and handles
overlapping competencies and border issues so as to optimize the information-gathering
process. The primary task is to survey what's needed to build a successful information
network (one that achieves an optimized process for solving problems, driving decisions,
and getting a competitive advantage). There can be several knowledge architects who
divide the responsibilities for the information services in an organization. In that case,
another role might exist, the chief knowledge officer (CKO) that is responsible for
coordinating the KAs.

Technology Requirements

The following list describes the technologies required for a successful intranet:
ƒ Uniform Resource Locator (URL) technologies to link related information
together into an information Web.
ƒ Directory Services that store information about people's roles and
responsibilities in the organization.
ƒ File servers extended with Web servers to access the documents over
standard Internet protocols.
ƒ Home pages on the Web servers for each specific business problem,
presenting groups of related knowledge assets.

Microsoft Technologies

The following list describes the Microsoft technologies that help you build a complete
intranet:
ƒ Microsoft FrontPage For building and managing Webs, especially to
link the information together and to create Web server home pages.
ƒ Microsoft Office 2000 Web Folders and Server Extensions To enable
the storing and accessing of Office 2000 documents on Web servers
through HTTP/WebDAV.
ƒ Microsoft Internet Information Server with Active Server Pages
(ASP) To access roles and responsibility data in directory services.
ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server For a global corporate directory service
with information about roles and responsibilities.
ƒ Microsoft Visual Studio For developing easy access to directory data,
enabling the finding of people, and including this information within Web
server home pages.
The main difference in technologies (shown in Figure A-6) over the collaborative
environment is the need to define how the documents should be grouped and then to link
them together into the information Web. Microsoft FrontPage is the tool for creating and
managing the Web groups (Sub Webs) and hyperlinks.

The integration of data from data stores and structures other than file-based documents
is more complex than creating and managing a Web with standard HTML and URL
technologies. FrontPage, a tool for creating and managing Web sites, delivers some
support for developing ASPs and integrating data access. However, Visual InterDev, a
Web development system that is part of Visual Studio, allows more flexibility. The
application services of both Windows NT Server and IIS, especially ASPs and COM
technology, allow the use of most common data sources over the information Web.
 Data-access components for these services already exist in Exchange, and they make it
easy to access data in Exchange Public Folders or Exchange Directory Service.

Scenarios and Recommendations

Extend the document locations on file servers with standard Internet technologies such
as Web services. This tactic will make every knowledge asset stored on these servers
accessible from standard Web browsers (through the use of HTTP). It will also
streamline the variety of access methods, making it easier for the knowledge workers.
Combining that with Office 2000 Web Folders and Server extensions will enable the
knowledge workers to store all Office documents direct on Web servers. An interesting
effect of the Microsoft Office 2000 Server Extensions is that they enable discussion
threads and inline discussions on Office documents stored in the Web folders. This is an
additional functionality for knowledge management in pinning additional information,
such as comments or suggestions, to the documents to which they relate.

Figure A-6: The complete intranet.

ƒ Build home pages for related information and information groups. HTML
pages should include links to all knowledge sources: not only internal
documents but also people and external pages. This will supply your
knowledge workers with one-stop access to those related knowledge
assets.
ƒ Use Microsoft FrontPage 2000 for creating HTML pages. FrontPage
2000 has a variety of collaborative abilities with Office 2000 and
Exchange to make it easy to include heterogeneous links.
ƒ Extend the Messaging Directory with information about roles and
responsibilities. This will enable workers to search the corporate address
book for knowledge contacts. Start using the Exchange Directory Service
extensively to build your corporate directory, and include basic
information about people skills in it. Also, Microsoft Internet Information
Server and ASP technologies make this data available from intranet
pages.
ƒ Use integrated development environments to create, manage, and
develop your knowledge-management intranet; in particular, use
FrontPage 2000 and Visual InterDev 6 to develop the HTML and ASP
pages. Specifically, the use of Design Time Controls (DTCs) helps to
integrate dynamic data. For example, the Exchange DTC enables access
to Exchange Public Folder data in ASP pages. Other useful features are
templates and themes, which help developers build a consistent look and
feel for all the Web pages.
ƒ Use the Active Directory Service Interface (ADSI) to access the
Exchange directory. ADSI is the Microsoft strategic API for accessing
directory data. This is recommended over native Lightweight Directory
Access Protocol (LDAP) APIs.
Communities, Teams, and Experts
The two prerequisite technologies of knowledge management put all collaboration and
document-based knowledge sources together and enables the knowledge worker to
browse through informational objects based on knowledge groups. Communities, teams,
and experts add the next level of sharing knowledge and turn it to results.

Teams differ from communities in that teams are task driven, and communities are
interest driven. Usually a team works closely together (a workgroup) on the same tasks
and goals. In many cases, the information produced by a team is closely held within the
team until it has reached a level of completeness where it can be shared-for example, in
a review-with a broader audience. Communities are mostly driven by interests in the
same area and are more loosely coupled (for example, by subscriptions). The
information shared by a community is closely held at the final release. Communities are
especially useful for building knowledge to higher levels, often by getting successive
levels of input from a wide audience.

This enabling component supports knowledge workers' joining communities by

subscribing themselves to subject matter sources. The building of communities and
teams is characteristic of this component, whether they are driven by the information in
the knowledge management system, are administered by a knowledge management
architect, or service themselves.

The role of an expert is to qualify and filter information. Each expert is related to a limited
set of subjects. (Nobody can be an expert in everything.) Those subject matter experts
(SMEs) can be defined in two ways. The first is by organizational function (as defined by
the knowledge architect). The second is as well-known experts in their team or
organization who have assumed the status of an SME for contributing high quality
information or for reviewing it.

The SME is an important role for anyone working within an intranet related to knowledge
management. In traditional intranet solutions, there is little control over who can store or
upload information into the intranet. This is not a bad thing, and this often helps to build
an extensive information repository. But to maximize the usefulness of the intranet, the
information should be filtered (is this really useful information), classified (which type or
category of information is this), and grouped together (which information correlates to
this). This process is part of the responsibility of the SME.

Communities, teams, and experts also control the process of putting information into the
knowledge-management system. Filtering, qualifying, approving, or more complex
workflow processes for documents and other electronic data need to be established. In a
knowledge-management system, these processes are not strictly based on traditional
organizational roles (manager, reviewer, approver, author, and so forth) but more on the
SMEs. This can add a great level of flexibility to the knowledge-management system and
the automated processes.

One example, especially for the SME-based case, is to add some excitement to the
system through the possibility that knowledge workers who have achieved expert status
in their subject, can subscribe themselves as SMEs (for example, after passing an online
knowledge test) and get included into review or even approval processes.

Together with the collaborative prerequisite that enables the infrastructure with e-mail
services, this component empowers the knowledge worker to get information quickly and
proactively from a knowledge-management system right on the knowledge-management
desktop. The e-mail system notifies groups of people with corresponding skills and
interests about new knowledge assets and delivers the information that they need.

Technology Requirements

Technology requirements for communities, teams, and experts include the following:
 ƒ Directory and membership services that support community building.
This is achieved by grouping people together into expert teams working
on the same set of information or having the same needs and interests in
specific information.
ƒ Forum services to create workspaces for communities and teams that
contain all interest-related data.
ƒ Self-subscription services to specific matters of interest for informa- tion
delivery and subscribing.
ƒ Services to assign specific knowledge-management roles to know- ledge
workers.
ƒ Workflow services for automating processes based on roles and SMEs.
ƒ Tracking services that follow team contacts and team activities.
ƒ Monitor services that enable SMEs to filter information.
ƒ Dynamic-distribution lists and automated-subscription services for e-mail.
ƒ E-mail services for automating notification, routing, and simple workflow
methods.
ƒ Organization-wide databases that integrate and allow searching for skill
data and other HR information to enhance communities and teams.
ƒ Home pages on Web servers for each community, team, or expert to
speed up the access to knowledge sources.

Microsoft Technologies

The following list describes the Microsoft technologies that satisfy the requirements for
the Communities, Teams, and Experts component:
ƒ Microsoft Office 2000 Server Extensions For departmental notification
services based on subscriptions to Office documents on Web servers (in
Web Folders).
ƒ Microsoft Outlook 2000 and Microsoft Exchange Server For team
activity tracking.
ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server For team-based directory services, building
forums and workspaces, assigning roles, notification through e-mail, and
collaborative workflow services that are interpersonal and team-based
workflow intensive for example, approval services.
ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server or Microsoft SQL Server As a database
with information about people skills (in order to locate the relevant
SMEs).
ƒ Microsoft Internet Information Services with Active Server Pages
(ASP) To access people-skills databases.
ƒ Microsoft Visual Studio For development of easy access to directories,
forums, and people skills data, as well as enabling the finding of people
who are experts in a specific subject.
ƒ Microsoft Site Server For building communities, subscribing to
knowledge briefs, and notification.

Scenarios and Recommendations

Build community forums, and allow flexibility to add forums dynamically on demand. Use
moderated forums to allow SMEs to filter and control content. Related recommendations
include the following:
ƒ Build Exchange public folders for forums and assign moderators to them.
ƒ Use Outlook Web access for accessing forums over HTTP or build forum
webs with Visual InterDev 6, the Microsoft Exchange DTC, and CDO to
access forum data in Exchange public folders.
ƒ Use the Exchange directory and ASP pages build a subscribing
mechanism to forums. Build notification services based on Exchange
distribution lists for each forum. When knowledge workers subscribe for
notifications, an Exchange contact is generated and added to the forums
distribution list.
ƒ Use Site Server 3 to provide full text search on the forums.
 A different concept is to build communities based on Site Server 3 knowledge manager
and shared briefs. Each shared brief is a collection of knowledge assets based on Site
Server search catalogs. The knowledge briefs are defined by SMEs. Site Server 3.0
membership directory is used to build communities. Together with Site Server direct
mailer and Internet Information Server SMTP service, notification services can be built
for each community.
Build teams and team workspaces, and assign roles to team members to manage the
workspace and its knowledge assets. Related recommendations include the following:
ƒ Check whether any of the Outlook Team Folder application tem- plates
match the needs of the team workspace.
ƒ Use Exchange public folders for team workspaces and Exchange
distribution lists for defining teams. Add roles to members in the
distribution lists on the Exchange public folder.
ƒ Within public folders, define an information structure that's useful to the
team (with subfolders such as tasks, meetings, and contacts) and create
views of public folders that show important data first.
ƒ Use Outlook 2000 Public Folder homepages for each team work- space
to link knowledge assets, such as people and applications for the team,
with contents in Exchange Public Folders (for example, display SMEs for
the team on the public folder home page).
ƒ Use rich controls, such as the Outlook 2000 view control, in the folder
home pages to display team data, such as calendars and task lists.
ƒ Use Outlook 2000 activity tracking to support team activities, such as
sharing contacts.
Extend directory information from the e-mail system with people skills/HR information (as
shown in Figure A-7):
ƒ Extend the corporate directory with basic information about subject
matter experts (SMEs) using the Exchange directory service
ƒ Add people-skills data to Exchange public folders, or, if a strong
relationship exists in this data. base an HR database on SQL Server
ƒ Use SQL Server data-transformation services to consolidate existing
people-skill and other HR information from relational databases in
Exchange public folders or in SQL Server databases to create a single
access point for the knowledge-management system
ƒ Make this information searchable (either in Exchange public folders or in
a SQL Server database) with Site Server

Figure A-7: Adding expert information to the directory.

Add notification and routing services to the e-mail system, as shown in Figure A-8.
Define roles for approval and simple workflow processes with the messaging directory.
Integrate community information in the workflow processes (for example, reviewing and
approving documents).
Figure A-8: Notification and routing services.

Portals and Search

Almost everybody knows portal services such as Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, or MSN, where
consumer-oriented services allow easy information shopping. Those portals categorize
personal interests in groups like news, sports, economy, education, science,
entertainment, and so on, and they allow easy browsing within those groups in building a
logical hierarchy of subgroups or forums. (See "Communities, Teams, and Experts"
earlier in this appendix for more information about forums.) The ability not only to browse
but also to search support the consumer in the odyssey to gain knowledge out of the
biggest information store on Earth (the Internet). Another huge benefit of these consumer
portals is the high customization they provide for its visitors. Objects of interest can be
included and placed in a personalized portal, allowing immediate access when visitors
return to the portal site.

This technique, when applied to business-oriented goals, is one of the key modules that
enable knowledge management if you follow the idea of the consumer-oriented portals in
the corporate world. Business portals provide information to knowledge workers within
the company, and they can also quickly supply external suppliers and customers with
task-relevant information objects. The goal of such a portal is the transparent enterprise,
hiding complexity to facilitate knowledge access over the enterprise information stores
with legacy applications. Examples of business portal objects include these:
ƒ Important corporate and team links
ƒ Team-application links
ƒ Incoming mail notification and headers
ƒ Personal tasks
ƒ Corporate search
ƒ Integration of business intelligence data

From the examples, some direct organizational tasks can be defined. Teams in the
enterprise need these definitions in order to locate information from inside or outside the
company that allows them to include links to that information into the portal. The kinds of
data in Management Information Systems (MIS) and/or Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP) need to be in the business portal as well as information on how this data has been
made accessible and useful (or intelligent) when presented for analysis.
This component defines also the creation of catalogs that groups related information
based on business needs over stores of structured and unstructured enterprise
information. This knowledge-management information base allows full-text search
against the partitioned data. An extension to the catalogs is the definition of searches
against these catalogs by SMEs (see the "Communities, Teams, and Experts" section
earlier in this appendix) and makes these search definitions available.

In order to define the catalogs for an organization, there has to be a very good
understanding of the business and its processes. At this stage, the knowledge architect
needs the support from the different divisions, business units, and departments that
understand how their information is organized and how it relates their business goals,
tasks, and needs.

Technology Requirements

The following list describes the technological requirements for implementing the Portal
and Search component:
ƒ Systems that allow customization of the business portal
ƒ Web browsers with personalization systems offer the ability to include
desktop services like e-mail, collaboration data, or business-intelligence
tools for accessing rich presentations of MIS/ERP data
ƒ Development suites for building and maintaining the business portal
pages and sites
ƒ Catalog and search services that integrate all kinds of information
sources (for example, file and Web servers, databases, and document-
management systems) and crawl-external resources like partner and
suppliers sites or the Internet
ƒ Services to build a virtual single storage location that combines all
catalogs for knowledge retrieval
ƒ Notification services that react to changes in catalogs and integrate with
the e-mail system
ƒ Database replication and transformation services that pull information
from different data sources into the search system

Another way to achieve proactive knowledge delivery in portals is through channel

technology. The concept of knowledge-management channels is comparable to cable TV
channels. The knowledge worker can subscribe to a channel (or get an automatic
subscription based on an interest group to which she belongs) that is implemented within
an area of the knowledge-management portal. This area is updated each time channel-
related information changes in the knowledge-management system. From Microsoft's
perspective, the future of this technology is questionable, which may dissuade some
users from channel technology. To determine whether your knowledge management
solution should include channels, you might consider putting the channel technology
through a user-acceptance test phase.

Microsoft Technologies

The following Microsoft technologies are useful for implementing the Portals and Search
component:
ƒ Microsoft Site Server For personalizing the knowledge-management
portal:
o Build catalogs that contain a document index and to
integrate data sources (such as file and Web servers,
Microsoft Exchange stores, databases, and information
captured by crawling Internet sites) into a full text-
retrieval system.
o Build shared knowledge briefs (searches against Site
Server catalogs) and make them accessible on the
knowledge-management portal.
ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server For e-mail notification services.
ƒ Microsoft Office 2000 Web Components and Outlook 2000 View
Control For building rich portal services that present dynamic data.
ƒ Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and Dynamic HTML (DHTML) To build
sophisticated portal interfaces, hosting rich controls and interaction with
knowledge workers.
ƒ Microsoft FrontPage 2000 and Microsoft Visual InterDev To develop
and maintain rich portals with components and customized search
capability based on catalogs.
 ƒ Microsoft SQL Server with Data Transformation Services (DTS)
For building a central repository of information related to specific
business tasks.
An important quality of a search system designed for knowledge management is that it
allows an integrated search of all information sources, even collating and sorting the
results. A good practice is to build a central search server that is responsible for
delivering the results to the users of the knowledge-management system who get their
information (catalogs) from catalog-building servers. Only these catalog-building servers
gather the information from the knowledge-base sources, build the catalogs, and
propagate these to the search servers. Figure A-9 shows an example.

Figure A-9: A search system implemented with Microsoft technologies.

Scenarios and Recommendations

Define each content catalog well. This will increase usability of the search function in the
knowledge-management system. Related recommendations are in the following list:
ƒ Too many catalogs will make it difficult to find related knowledge assets
later (disjointed result sets). Too few catalogs will result in too
generalized content, and it will be difficult to get an exact result set.
ƒ Building a central data repository (consolidating databases) is preferable
to maintaining multiple catalogs in the search topology. Consolidation will
simplify the search infrastructure and management.
ƒ Include collaboration data in Exchange public folders (for example,
bulletin boards, forums, and discussion databases) and MIS/ERP data in
the catalogs.
ƒ Replicate Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino databases and applications in
Exchange public folders and applications by using Microsoft Lotus Notes
Application Connector. The application connector provides bi-directional
replication, which allows the sharing of discussion and other databases.
The information in the public folders can then be indexed and searched
with Site Server.
ƒ Use SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) to consolidate
MIS/ERP data and legacy databases that need to be included in the
virtual storage of the knowledge management system.
ƒ Use the e-mail client as the knowledge management portal. As the e-mail
client is the focus of information sharing and is typically one of the first
applications a knowledge worker uses in daily business, use it for hosting
the portal pages.
ƒ Use the Outlook Today feature in Outlook 2000 for the portal service and
integration with personal productivity data (see Figure A-10). The
Outlook 2000 View Control provides great flexibility in integrating
collaborative data into the Outlook Today portal page.
ƒ Make the Outlook Today feature in Outlook 2000 the start page for all
users, to guide them to the appropriate knowledge assets depending on
their business unit, information, needs, and interests.
Figure A-10: Knowledge-management portals with integrated information sources.
ƒ Include business-intelligence (BI) data in the knowledge-management
portal. Speeding up the decision process is one goal of knowledge
management, and placing BI data on the portal allows dynamic viewing
of data that supports decision making. Use Office 2000 Web
Components, such as the Excel 2000 PivotTable component or Access
2000 Data Access Pages, to put business intelligence on the knowledge-
management portal.
ƒ Include business-intelligence (BI) data in the knowledge-management
portal. Speeding up the decision process is one goal of knowledge
management, and placing BI data on the portal allows dynamic viewing
of data that supports decision making. Use Office 2000 Web
Components, such as the Excel 2000 PivotTable component or Access
2000 Data Access Pages, to put business intelligence on the knowledge-
management portal.
ƒ Make the knowledge-management portal customizable. This will allow
the knowledge workers to optimize the organization of their knowledge-
management desktop, thereby applying the knowledge resources they
need most and getting better results.
ƒ Use the Site Server personalization system and its active user object to
make the knowledge-management portal customizable. Use SQL Server
for the personalization directory.
ƒ Use the personalization DTC in Visual InterDev to support the
development of customizable portals.

Content Management
The Portals and Search component addresses the problem of searching for knowledge
in all information sources in the enterprise. This knowledge includes structured and
unstructured internal information objects such as Office documents, collaborative data,
MIS and ERP systems, and experts, as well as information from outside sources such as
partners, suppliers, and competitors. External sources, and in particular the Internet,
represent tremendous potential for gathering knowledge if the criteria for including such
information are chosen well. All of the pools of information sources that are part of, and
accessible to, the knowledge-management system combine to build the knowledge-
management information base.
This component handles how knowledge assets get into the knowledge-management
information base. To handle this new complexity of the knowledge management
information base and to help the knowledge workers to stay focused on solving business
problems (without disappearing in technology), a sophisticated knowledge-management
taxonomy needs to be built based on metadata (data that describes other data). The
 Portals and Search component also needs to publish information in the knowledge base,
for example, categories and attributes. The knowledge management information base
must then be made accessible through operations driven by the metadata complex. See
Figure A-11.

Figure A-11: Vocabulary based on categories and attributes.

In the publishing process, several things should be considered concerning the
knowledge-management taxonomy. Although tagging documents with metadata is
important for the quality of content in this stage of document publishing, it is a burden for
people to submit information if tagging the metadata is a complex or time-consuming
process. One of the basic conditions mentioned at the beginning of this roadmap was
that a knowledge-management system must encourage users to submit information.
Positive aspects for promoting this condition are the building of well-focused
communities (see "Communities, Teams, and Experts", earlier in this appendix), so
users feel part of and respected in a concentrated team and don't lose their inclination or
motivation to submit material. Building huge submission and posting systems in which
users don't get recognized or rewarded will discourage them from providing their
knowledge, which therefore prevents the company from evolving a culture for knowledge
management.

Technology Requirements

The following are features that are available for searching external knowledge sources:
ƒ Listing and browsing.
ƒ Sorting.
ƒ Grouping.
ƒ Filtering.
ƒ Searching.
ƒ Publishing information to the knowledge-management information base.
ƒ Finding the right metadata-essential to managing information-is a
challenging process for the knowledge manager. Too much metadata will
add high complexity to the system, lowering the overall effectiveness, as
it becomes difficult to search, browse, and publish accurately.
ƒ Too little metadata will lead to only rough partitions that bring about fuzzy
information results.
As you read earlier, the process of publishing new knowledge information is critical for
maximizing the quality and usefulness of the knowledge-management information base.
Knowledge workers need an easy process to classify knowledge assets based on the
defined metadata. SMEs (see "Communities, Teams, and Experts", earlier in this
appendix) can be leveraged to support this process of assuring quality and are of great
importance to this module. Their task is the final classification, filtering, and approval of
the published knowledge assets. One solution is to provide pre-tagging features for all
users in a review and approval loop and also to process tags that the SMEs add.

Many of the functionalities required for this component are implemented today in
document-management systems. Most of these integrate into BackOffice and should be
taken into consideration when building content-management solutions. In the Microsoft
environment, there are several options for implementing content-management stores,
which are essentially partitions of related information, especially for documents. In the
Site Server scenario, content stores are implemented with the NTFS file system.

Microsoft Technologies

The following Microsoft products and technologies are available for implementing content
management in your knowledge-management solution:
ƒ NTFS file system
ƒ Microsoft Exchange
ƒ Microsoft SQL Server

Using the available technologies, knowledge-management functionality can be

implemented as shown in the following list, which also summarizes the criteria used
when deciding on the appropriate content store for a specific solution:

File System with Site Server 3.0

ƒ Publishing Based on Metadata: Strong Site Server content
management
ƒ Rich Views Based on Metadata: Weak Site Server P&M and
Knowledge Manager
ƒ Subscription and Notification Services: Medium Site Server
Knowledge Manager
ƒ Approval and Workflow Processes: Weak Site Server content
management

Exchange Server
ƒ Publishing Based on Metadata: Strong Outlook or HTML forms
ƒ Rich Views Based on Metadata: Awesome Built-in views, sorting,
grouping, filtering
ƒ Subscription and Notification Services: Strong Out-of-the box
features, such as Public Folder rules; list server functionalities or
integration with Site Server Search and Knowledge Manager
ƒ Approval and Workflow Processes: Medium Collaborative workflow
processes; out-of-the box moderated folders; development: Event
Scripting for Approval Services; Routing Objects for role-based workflow
ƒ Check In/Check Out Mechanism: Medium Possible without big
development work; third-party solutions
ƒ Versioning Mechanism: Weak Possible, but development necessary;
third-party solutions

SQL Server
ƒ Publishing Based on Metadata: Weak To develop: application for
implementing hybrid model (metadata in SQL Server and documents in
file system); third-party solutions
ƒ Rich Views Based on Metadata: Strong To develop: dependent on
database design and application development; third-party solutions
ƒ Subscription and Notification Services: Strong To develop: stored
procedures and Exchange integration for notification services; application
for subscriptions based on SQL tables or integration with Site Server
Search and Knowledge Manager
ƒ Approval and Workflow Processes: Awesome To develop: great for
transaction-oriented work-item processing; most flexible for
 organizational related workflow solutions, but needs intensive
development work; third-party solutions.
ƒ Check In/Check Out Mechanism: Medium To develop: application
development; third-party solutions
ƒ Versioning Mechanism: Weak To develop: third-party solutions

All metadata is defined in the Site Server personalization directory. In order to establish a
publishing process, content stores are defined in Site Server, and then the created
metadata is assigned to a specific content store. Site Server can automatically create
HTML forms with metadata list boxes for uploading documents to the content store and
can also include the metadata in the publishing process. These HTML forms can be
customized with FrontPage 2000 or Visual InterDev. Site Server supports the creation of
content stores for the NTFS file system only.

Through the use of Exchange as a content store, Outlook forms or HTML forms can be
created with MAPI-properties as metadata, and the document can then be treated as an
attachment to the form. The Exchange Mesa DB Lookup Control can be used to
dynamically populate metadata properties on Outlook forms. This scenario can also use
the post-processing feature of Site Server to create an Outlook form out of an ASP page
with CDO, assign all metadata as MAPI properties, and attach the published document
to that Outlook form.

One of the challenges of a knowledge-management system is understanding how the

users of the knowledge-management system interact with the knowledge-management
information base. The regular analysis of usage and content to ensure that the
knowledge-management system fulfills its purpose and is up to date is essential for the
success of the system. Unused or useless documents or other information (which might
be identified by value scores from readers) should be removed by garbage-collection
services from the knowledge-management information base.

Content that is not valuable to users needs to be identified, and content that has great
value can be presented in hit lists on the knowledge-management portal or distributed
through notification services in e-mail.

An interesting extension is the creation of a hit list that includes information about
people. Well-known SMEs who have read a particular document are listed, along with
related documents they have read to become experts. A second variation is the
possibility for everybody to review and submit comments (or vote how valuable this
information was for them) to documents. This list can be shown as an extension of the
list of professionals (well-known SMEs) who made comments (for example, what other
people think about that document).

Site Server Analysis supports this task. It has several tools to analyze the usage of the
knowledge-management site, including who visits the knowledge-management system,
where they go, how long they stay, and so forth. Additionally, Site Server's analysis tools
find broken links or outdated content. Site Server has also a voting component that can
be used for implementing rating systems in the knowledge-management system.

Scenarios and Recommendations

Define each content class and its associated metadata well. This will increase the
usability of the publishing and search functionality of your knowledge-management
system. Additional recommendations include the following:
ƒ Too many content classes will lead to publishing related documents
under different content stores, which will make it more difficult to find
them later (disjointed result sets). Too few content classes will result in
too generalized content, making it difficult to get an exact result set.
ƒ The more precisely the metadata is defined, the easier it is to find
information based on different criteria. This is especially important as an
SME might search and browse for the same data using different
keywords from those a beginner would use.
Define a publishing strategy for documents and integrate it into the knowledge-
management system. Ensure that, during the publishing process, users can tag the
documents according to the defined metadata:
ƒ If documents reside in Exchange public folders, create Outlook or HTML
forms and treat the documents as attachments. Think of storing the
metadata in special public folders and using the Mesa DB Lookup
Control to populate the metadata properties in the forms.
ƒ If documents reside in content stores based on file systems, use Site
Server content-management features. Use Site Server as a metadata
directory and SQL Server as a storage repository for the metadata. Use
Site Server publishing services for creating publishing forms and posting
processes for documents.

Use XML as the markup language for assigning metadata to describe and deliver rich,
structured data to the knowledge-management information base and applications:
ƒ Use Office 2000 applications (especially FrontPage), Visual InterDev,
and XML Notepad to create or extend XML-based documents and data.
ƒ Use Internet Explorer 5 and an XML parser to process XML-based data.
ƒ Use the Site Server tag tool to apply tags to HTML documents and to
categorize them. Site Server Search will use these tags to gather and
catalog these documents.
Integrate analysis services in the knowledge-management system. This helps to keep
useful data in the knowledge-management information base. Use this data also to
personalize the knowledge-management portals. Related recommendations include
using the following products:
ƒ Use Site Server 3 analysis for analyzing both the usage and content of
the knowledge-management system.
ƒ Use Site Server voting components to track the quality of the knowledge
management information

Integrate line-of-business (LOB) data to maximize the completeness of the content

stores in the knowledge-management system:
ƒ Integrate SQL Server 7 with Data Transformation Services (DTS) for
building a consolidated content store of legacy databases.
ƒ If it is not practical to consolidate data using RDBMS systems, use
Microsoft Data Access Components and intranet technologies to
integrate dynamic data sources.
ƒ Use ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) as a programming interface for
consistent, high-performance access to data. ADO is the single data
interface for developing one-to-n-tier client/server and Web-based data-
driven solutions.
ƒ Prefer OLE DB as a data access provider to RDBMS and legacy
databases.
ƒ Use Remote Data Services (RDS) as client-side services to develop
data-centric applications within ActiveX-enabled browsers. RDS brings
the advantages of client-side caching of data results, update- able data,
and support for data-aware ActiveX controls.
ƒ Use Collaborative Data Objects (CDO) for access to Exchange folders
and for e-mail functionality. Choose CDO over Messaging API (MAPI)
whenever possible, as CDO is the strategic API for accessing Microsoft
Exchange data.

Real-Time Collaboration
Knowledge on a specific subject is often undocumented and is therefore unavailable to
most of the organization. This scenario shows some ways of getting the knowledge into
a state where an IT system can manage it. This especially focuses on areas where
computers can help your workers exchange thoughts, documents, and other aids for
capturing this tacit knowledge for the knowledge-management information base.
The process of capturing tacit knowledge can start with the introduction of simple
computer-based chat services. Regular meetings arranged with expert groups to talk
about specific topics can be extended with these services, well known from the Internet
and enriched by building automatic transcripts for the chat sessions. Transcripts can be
easily enriched with corporate metadata and stored in the information base for later
search and retrieval.

More complex services, such as video conferencing, follow the same concept. The video
stream is recorded on video equipment and later transferred to the knowledge-
management system. Descriptions and metadata are either merged with this video
stream or can stored in parallel in a file or a database. In cultures where such virtual
meetings are common, an event database is typically built where upcoming and past
meetings are stored together with event titles and descriptions. They are listed or
searchable by subject matter (or, of course, by using the metadata), and a hyperlink is
provided so that users can join a virtual meeting. If the meeting takes place in the future,
integration into the e-mail system ensures that this event is marked in the calendar, and,
on the event date, a reminder automatically points the participant toward the virtual
meeting. After the event or meeting, on-demand services will make that knowledge
available by providing the recorded video out of the knowledge-management information
base to the knowledge-management desktop.

When integrating this technology into the scenario of automated knowledge-

management services, notifications are sent automatically to the appropriate knowledge
workers to remind them of an interesting meeting or event. The appropriate URLs can
also be listed on the knowledge-management portal.

An interesting hybrid of both technologies above (chat and video services) is the
integration of presentation techniques. In that case, an online presentation that consists
of slides is sent over the network. The audience receives the video, audio, and slides of
the presentation on its knowledge-management desktop. The chat service is integrated
as a separate area on the knowledge-management desktop, and it enables the audience
to type questions during the meeting into the chat area. These questions are transferred
to the presenter or a person controlling the online presentation. On receiving the
questions, the presenter can answer them during or at the end of the event. All three
sources-the slides as a static document, the chat as a transcript document, and the
audio and video as a stream-are linked together and stored in the knowledge-
management system.

The same technologies not only make virtual events available for the knowledge-
management information base, but also data from events such as conferences can be
captured. Each session on a conference can be recorded and made available for all
employees in the events system on the corporate network. Another solution is to produce
CDs of the sessions and distribute them to all subsidiaries or make them available for
ordering by interested employees.

Real-time collaboration supports sharing the creation process, making it possible for
knowledge workers separated by distance to share a single virtual working space and
work together to create documents. This includes sharing the creation process using not
only a productivity suite but also whiteboard functionality. This kind of technology is also
called screen sharing.

Technology Requirements

Technologies that you should use to implement the real-time collaboration component
include the following:
ƒ Chat services with transcript functionality for distance discussion
ƒ Video conferencing for virtual meetings
ƒ Screen-sharing services for sharing the document-creation process,
using virtual whiteboards, and sharing applications
ƒ Streaming-media services for recording virtual meetings and video
(meeting) on demand services
 ƒ Event and meeting databases for organizing the virtual event center

Microsoft Technologies
The following list describes the Microsoft technologies that meet the requirements in the
previous section (see Figure A-12 for more information about how these technologies
interact):
ƒ Microsoft Exchange Server Chat Services For chat services and
transcripts.
ƒ Microsoft PowerPoint For presentation broadcasts.
ƒ Microsoft NetMeeting For video conferencing, document sharing,
application services, and whiteboard functionality.
ƒ Microsoft Windows Media Player For accessing all kind of audio and
video streams.
ƒ Microsoft NetShow Server and NetShow Content Editing Tools
For recording, broadcasting, and multicasting of online events and
tagging the content with metadata for linking it to the knowledge-
management information base.
ƒ Microsoft Outlook 2000 For integration with the NetMeeting
conferencing software and Microsoft NetShow services.
ƒ Microsoft SQL Server For building the events database.

Figure A-12: Real-time collaboration using Microsoft technologies.

Business Challenges
Implementing a knowledge-management solution presents many challenges, such as the
following:
ƒ Complete Integration of Knowledge How knowledge is built, located, and
related to maximize the spectrum of the knowledge management system?
(Make knowledge and services from all units within the enterprise
accessible.)
ƒ Technical Integration What are the infrastructures that need to be in the
enterprise knowledge-management system?
ƒ Central Manageability What technologies are used for knowledge
management in the enterprise and where are the connection or integration
points to make the system manageable for a central IT department.
After identifying the knowledge-management services that need to be implemented to
improve specific business processes, the technology necessary to support these goals is
evaluated. This can be a complex procedure; a summary of system or infrastructure
requirements, measured against the services the knowledge-management system
should provide, will help to adjust the scope of the project appropriately. Figures A-13
and A-14 show one example of how to develop such a summary by looking at the
 evolving technology and knowledge-management services from two principle
perspectives:
ƒ Graph of evolving technology and knowledge management over time
This can be built from a feature list that provides functionalities that need to
be added over time to improve the services of a knowledge management
system.
ƒ Graph of technology and its effectiveness This will show, at a high level,
how a specific technology added to the knowledge-management system
will improve the system's effectiveness.

The two graphs help to determine what level of technology and infrastructure needs to
be implemented and the outcomes to be expected from this approach.

Figure A-13: Graph of evolving technology and knowledge management over time.

Figure A-14: Graph of technology and its effectiveness.

One way to tackle the enterprise knowledge-management challenge is by taking a

bottom-up approach to building intranets or departmental solutions. In this approach,
small pilots are built that implement some functionalities of the components that enable
knowledge management. To keep these pilots at a manageable size, they should be
locally controlled and include the information needs of a specific department that's not
widely scattered throughout the enterprise.

After the start of the pilots, the big picture should never be lost when combining
information fragments into an enterprise knowledge-management system. Choose the
right technologies, and hire vendors that can deliver a sophisticated solution as well as
the interfaces and scalability an organization needs to bind its existing and new
information infrastructure and services together.
After the knowledge-management pilots have been deployed, the concepts behind the
central junction point for all knowledge-management pieces should be proven. This hub
must integrate the pilot systems that were just built. It is the first step in extending the
information infrastructure to a centralized, controllable knowledge-management system.
An enterprise knowledge-management system builds, on the back end, an equivalent to
the knowledge-management portal for the user. As the knowledge-management portal
concentrates all information that is valuable to a specific knowledge worker, the central
knowledge-management backbone concentrates all information that is valuable to the
whole enterprise. After all knowledge-management islands are built and integrated, this
backbone will be the entry point for all enterprise-related information. In terms of
knowledge management, this central knowledge-management hub, or knowledge-
management backbone, is also called a metaserver.

Wrap Up
Requirements for an enterprise-wide knowledge-management system include the
following:
ƒ A chief knowledge officer or knowledge architect has been identified and given
responsibility for the political, strategic, and technical implementation of
knowledge management in the enterprise.
ƒ Culture for technology usage is set up (electronic publishing, collaboration,
virtual meetings, and so on).
ƒ All knowledge-management islands are well connected (intranets or
departmental solutions).
ƒ Collaborative processes are established (workflow, approval, and information
tracking).
ƒ Enterprise knowledge-management information base is hyperlinked.
ƒ Processes keep the enterprise knowledge-management information base
healthy.

List of Figures
Introduction
Figure a: Knowledge management
Chapter 1: Knowledge Sources
Figure 1-1: Knowledge-management goals.
Figure 1-2: Information islands.
Chapter 2: Organizational Barriers
Figure 2-1: Preventing cultural barriers to knowledge management.
Figure 2-2: Choosing pilot groups.
Chapter 3: Product Design
Figure 3-1 : KWorld.
Figure 3-2: Using Outlook forms to organize project information.
Figure 3-3: Historical product success rates at Nabisco.
Figure 3-4: Problem solving with knowledge management.
Chapter 4: Customer Management
Figure 4-1: Microsoft sales groups.
Figure 4-2: Information loops.
Figure 4-3: Sales force automation.
Chapter 5: Employee Management
Figure 5-1: Consultant Network.
Chapter 6: Business Planning
Figure 6-1: Better decision making via business intelligence.
Chapter 7: Digital Dashboard
Figure 7-1: Office Web Components.
Figure 7-2: A typical knowledge-management platform.
Chapter 8: Microsoft Exchange Web Storage System
Figure 8-1: Centralized administration with Web Storage System.
Figure 8-2: Distributing Web Storage System databases.
Figure 8-3: Web Storage System Replication
Figure 8-4: Offline Folders.
Chapter 10: Intelligent Interfaces
Figure 10-1: English Query.
Appendix: Technology Roadmap
Figure A-1: Knowledge-management modules.
Figure A-2: Layers of a knowledge-management platform.
Figure A-3: Microsoft knowledge-management architecture.
Figure A-4: Sharing information.
Figure A-5 : Microsoft integration in a collaborative environment.
Figure A-6: The complete intranet.
Figure A-7: Adding expert information to the directory.
Figure A-8: Notification and routing services.
Figure A-9: A search system implemented with Microsoft technologies.
Figure A-10: Knowledge-management portals with integrated information sources.
Figure A-11 : Vocabulary based on categories and attributes.
Figure A-12: Real-time collaboration using Microsoft technologies.
Figure A-13: Graph of evolving technology and knowledge management over time.
Figure A-14: Graph of technology and its effectiveness.

List of Sidebars
Chapter 1: Knowledge Sources
Knowledge Management Advisor
Getting the Right Help
Action Plan
Chapter 2: Organizational Barriers
British Petroleum Snapshot
Personal Portals
J.D. Edwards Snapshot
Action Plan
Chapter 3: Product Design
KPMG Snapshot
Nabisco Snapshot
Action Plan
Chapter 4: Customer Management
Grassroots Solutions
Snapper Snapshot
Snyder Healthcare Sales Snapshot
MSDN Snapshot
Connect Austria ONE Snapshot
Action Plan
Chapter 5: Employee Management
Action Plan
Chapter 6: Business Planning
California Pizza Kitchen Snapshot
Foster Parents Plan Snapshot
Action Plan
Chapter 7: Digital Dashboard
Personal Digital Dashboards
Products for Dashboards
Action Plan
Chapter 8: Microsoft Exchange Web Storage System
Active Directory
 Action Plan
Chapter 9: Wireless Solutions
Wireless Application Protocol Forum
Bluetooth
Action Plan
Chapter 10: Intelligent Interfaces
Action Plan